


Don’t say you’ll stay ‘cause then you’ll go away

by mumuinc



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Graphic descriptions of drug use, Homophobia, M/M, Mental Illness, an endless sea of porn, so AU it's the new definition of "alternate universe", you're the worst au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-18 07:39:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14208363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: Kevin Day is an emotionally empty narcissist of a writer living in LA. He's just published his first novel and his rich girlfriend broke up with him to marry some rich dude for more money. When she invites him to her wedding, he didn't actually think he'd meet his match there.





	1. This is a trainwreck and we’re in this together

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU based on _You're the Worst_ TV series on FX, which is the kind of garbage dark comedy I love. Because that show is an endless fount of offensive stereotypes and jokes, expect this fic to be full of the same offensive humor. This isn't a romance—this is two people, and the people orbiting them, endlessly fucking over each other. If this isn't your thing, turn back now, because it just gets worse every chapter.
> 
> Title comes from _Damn, I wish I was your lover_ by Sophie B. Hawkins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is based in its entirety on S1EP1, which basically means much of the dialogue has also been lifted directly from the show. I'm not _that_ funny, and there are writers in the world who are better than me at doing this kind of fluffy shit.

Weddings, in the most basic sense of the word, fell in that category of “Holy fuck, I am so glad I’m not doing _that_ ” sort of trifling garbage Kevin Day was half-relieved would never befall him as the sound of a fork, or maybe it was a dessert spoon, tinkled against champagne-filled crystal to catch the attention of the tittering evening crowd of friends and family of the Knox-Reynolds-Gordon clans in time for the cake-cutting and all the banal speeches that came before it. There wasn’t entirely enough alcohol in the whole of LA to drown him in the kind of bullshit sham marriage Allison Reynolds had invited him to, and not for the least reason that it was hers, and Kevin was the ex whose face she wanted to rub her happiness into.

 

The fake valley girl drawl of her sweet-sounding voice amplified on Bang & Olufsen speakers at least managed to drown out the sound of the spit of camera flash as Kevin went through the stack of thirty disposable Kodaks from another era prepared for guests to help the “loving couple” remember their wedding day. Wasting a shot of the entire twelve snaps on photos of what lay inside his boxers was just the exacting kind of petty revenge he was meant to do. God, the sound of her voice grated on his ears so much he could feel his balls shriveling at each snap. The guests would actually love this. If he imagined their horrified faces at the sight of his pasty, unaroused dick, he could almost feel contentment.

 

His eyes roved around the ballroom hall. Whatever speech Allison and Seth had given was over now and people were starting to either drift onto the dance floor or line up for seconds at the buffet table. There was a boy in the pastry section stuffing plastic-wrapped angel cakes (with A&S in gold loopy script made of sugar icing that made the type look like “ASS” from where Kevin sat) into his messenger bag and Kevin would have found the whole thing funny if the very idea of angel cakes didn’t nauseate him. Who the fuck served that kind of plastic-wrapped garbage at a wedding?

 

He didn’t quite manage to finish the whole stack of cameras because Allison was apparently dancing with her guests now and Kevin saw opportunity like the neon red flash of a strip club flashing before his eyes. The list of heckles he’d prepared the night before had never felt so comforting in the breast pocket of his coat and he stood up and made his way to the dance floor, pausing only to feel around his front to make sure he’d zipped and belted himself up alright before sweeping Allison off from the arms of one of her adoring public. Wouldn’t really do if he popped out of his trousers before he’d managed the ultimate put down that would destroy this self-serving bitch and a half.

 

Allison’s smile was a little strained as he took her hands and swept her around in a slow dance reminiscent of the kind of pedestrian amusement she enjoyed when they were still dating. Fucking. Whatever that failed nightmare of a relationship was supposed to be. It was a mild effort to keep the fake smile on his face.

 

“Kevin,” she said, voice faintly tinged in surprise as he wrapped a hand around her waist to draw her close, all the better to savor the schadenfreude of the trainwreck he could feel unfolding in his hands. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

 

Kevin’s smile widened a nasty inch. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world, Alli. There’s something to be said about watching the kind of disaster unfolding like a supernova and being able to sit back and say ‘I was there’.”

 

Allison dropped her facade and shoved him away. “You’re unbelievable.”

 

“Just admit it,” Kevin goaded, scowling back. “You only invited me here so you could passive-aggressively rub my nose into your happiness. At least I would’ve had the decency to rub your face in it directly.”

 

“Oh! And your commitment to honesty is something so commendable!”

 

Kevin shrugged. “Well, yeah, it kind of is.”

 

People were starting to stare and it was awe-inspiring how that little detail transformed the graceful swan-like lines of Allison Reynolds into the kind of monstrous gargoyle Kevin had always known.

 

“It’s also what’s going to keep you alone,” she declared, restraint from keeping herself from calling him the kind of ugly names they’d flung at each other before popping veins in her slender neck. “Because you’re mean and petty and unpleasant—and you’re so not the original you think you are.”

 

“Oh wow! I’m not original? And you think you’re this—” Kevin cut himself off, that nasty grin back on his face like he couldn’t keep himself from enjoying the disaster unfolding. “But this isn’t about me, is it? No, this is about you and your—” He cut himself off again.

 

Allison shoved him, a lot harder than she had earlier, a lot stronger than Kevin would have thought for a woman with such a slim, fragile-looking body. “Oh, let’s hear you say it. I _really_ want to know what the great Kevin Day thinks about me.”

 

Kevin grinned even wider and spread his arms, leaning close to whisper his best heckle yet into Allison’s diamond-bedecked ear. Her eyes widened and she pushed again, half-heartedly this time, her bright blue eyes shining, whether with unshed tears of rage or regret, Kevin couldn’t really know, because just then, he was already being dragged back by rough hands and man-handled out into the hotel foyer, where Seth and two of his thug friends shoved his face flat into the red carpet.

 

Kevin rolled himself onto his elbows, unmindful of the dirt getting on his suit coat, in time for Seth to jab a threatening finger into his face.

 

“I don’t want to catch you talking to Allison again, or me and my boys are going to rough you up.”

 

Kevin snorted. “Who the hell talks like that?”

 

“I’m serious, Kevin. Stay away from Allison!”

 

“Fine!” he conceded, rolling his eyes as Seth and his posse turned away. “Enjoy your sham of a marriage!”

 

“I will!” Seth yelled back, and then he was alone.

 

Kevin scrambled to his feet and patted around his pockets for his cigarettes. God, what a fucking tragedy, and he hadn’t even managed to get to any of his best heckles. The soothing calm of nicotine hit his system as he took a drag and it was just about enough to stop the jitter of his twitching fingers. He was about to call for valet for his car when a tap on his arm gave him pause.

 

“Hey, you got another one of those?”

 

Kevin scowled and turned to see who had the audacity to interrupt the privacy of his introspection and was surprised to see the red-haired boy from the buffet tables, the one stealing angel cakes. He had an impish quality to his pale, smooth features, and the kind of cool blue eyes that reminded Kevin of helpless week-old kittens. He didn’t look old enough to even be buying cigarettes, let alone actually smoking one, and his tiny body was almost swamped by the size of the large gift-wrapped box he juggled in his skinny arms. Kevin wasn’t going to stop a high schooler from getting into the kind of vices he himself indulged in since he was fifteen though.

 

“This is pretty expensive,” he groused and the blue-eyed boy’s kohl-lined eyes stared up at him, pleading for mercy for a moment, before he glanced away. Kevin huffed. The boy looked like a drowned kitten, but Kevin wasn’t an actual monster. He flipped the pack open to offer a stick and lit the boy’s stick up, noticing as he did the fine tracery of lines around his eyes and mouth as he sucked on the cigarette and huffed out the smoke through his nostrils.

 

“Good job back there,” Blue Eyes said, setting the giant box in his arms down so he could tap out the ash from his cancer stick.

 

Kevin rolled his eyes. “Getting married doesn’t remove you from the burden of having to act like a decent human being.”

 

“Totally. Those two are doomed.”

 

“I mean, have you ever had a more dishonest start to a marriage? The balls to have a traditional Catholic ceremony even…!”

 

“... When she’s already had two abortions…”

 

“‘... I can only orgasm from anal!’” he mimicked with a snigger that died in his throat at the shocked gasp from a huddle of elderly people crowding through the hotel’s side door. Kevin smiled sheepishly, pretending to tip a hat off to the gaggle of old people. “Uh… Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds… _Elderly_ Reynolds…”

 

God, their family probably owned the hotel they were standing at. Blue Eyes giggled at him until the group wandered back inside.

 

“You’re pretty,” he couldn’t help commenting as the two of them stood there, awkwardly not facing each other.

 

The boy, well, he was a young man really, now that Kevin thought about it—he had none of the teenage roundness in his face and he seemed a little too gaunt and careworn to be anywhere younger than twenty-five—glanced back at him, a little puzzled. “Thanks?”

 

“Who did you know in that trainwreck back there?”

 

“I’m friends with the brother.”

 

Kevin blinked. “You mean that twink-ass kid, Jeremy?”

 

The man nodded. “Yeah, twink-boy Jeremy and I go way back.”

 

Kevin grinned, an idea suddenly forming. “So what does he have to say about me?”

 

The man shook out his wavy hair with a shrug. “Nothing, just that you’re the worst.”

 

“Says the boy who stole a blender from a wedding,” Kevin riposted with a smirk as he watched disappointment-tinged horror fill the other man’s eyes.

 

“No…!” He ripped the white and silver foil wrapping of the gift to reveal that it was, in fact, a blender, and a pretty expensive one from what Kevin could see. The man hurled the box into the manicured shrubbery lining the hotel’s walls with a despondent stamp of his foot. “I thought it was a food processor!”

 

Kevin sniggered again. “Who’s the worst now?”

 

He turned to sneer back at the redhead and found him already staring back. And well. Shit. Kevin hurled his cigarette away and grabbed the other man with one hand and flagging down one of the valets with the other.

 

There was something sordid and distinctly unpleasant to be said about going home with a complete stranger one met at a wedding. Red hair and blue eyes was all the different kinds of gorgeous that he’d like to have, sad, sorry, thrown-out ex sob story notwithstanding.

 

He wasn’t even gay.

* * *

The redhead’s name was Neil Josten and he wasn’t kidding around when he smirked at Kevin after pulling his lube-slicked fingers out of his own hole and said, “Ride or die, baby,” and proceeded to ride whatever was left of Kevin’s heterosexuality out of his cock so hard he thought his dick would be permanently bent out of shape. Kevin wasn’t half as coherent as he’d like to be and had given only a stupid drunken smile as he fucked into Josten’s slim, pliant body. He’d actually never met anyone who chewed gum while having mind-blowingly hot anal sex.

 

“God, I have no idea what the fuck I’m even doing here,” Josten muttered, pumping his hips hard and making Kevin groan loudly. “I’m not even attracted to you.”

 

Kevin sneered as he grabbed his hips and ground himself into that tight welcoming heat to chase his release. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

 

Josten paused a moment and looked down at Kevin’s sweat-sheened grinning face. There was something off in his eyes, like a kind of numbed deadness that Kevin hadn’t quite seen in any of the girls he’d gone through since moving to LA. Then he shrugged and grabbed his own cock, pumping himself in the same cadence as he milked Kevin of his release.

 

After, Josten walked around his bedroom, completely at ease with his nakedness as he checked out whatever clutter Kevin had on his nightstand. There wasn’t anything much there except for a favorite fountain pen—Japanese, Sailor brand and the kind people like him couldn’t really afford on a writer’s paycheck but one he owned anyway because what the fuck kind of writer was he if he didn’t have gorgeously outdated tools for his trade?—a notebook, an empty condom wrapper whose contents had been neatly chucked into the trash can after Kevin unloaded into them thanks to Josten’s sweet ass, and a 500ml bottle of lubricant with a pump nozzle because Kevin Day was nothing, if not a lazy horny bastard. He usually had five of his current reading list stacked beside his bed but he’d been too wired and annoyed with Allison’s impending nuptials in the days leading up to the current to get any reading done, so those were neatly shelved on top of his dresser, across the bed.

 

The sight of another person’s naked dick and balls in his room made him uneasy so he lent Josten a bathrobe while he pulled up his own boxers and got out of bed. It was just barely past 1:30AM and he was decidedly hungry, especially since he’d spent the entire evening taking pictures of his dick to spite his ex-girlfriend instead of having dinner at a dinner wedding reception.

 

They climbed up to his dining area in the dark apartment and shared a plastic container of leftover baked ziti and a bottle of cheap white wine while Josten told him that he didn’t drive.

 

“What?” Kevin said, shoveling soggy cold penne into his mouth with a plastic fork. There was no point in bringing out silverware for a booty call. “It’s LA, who here doesn’t drive?”

 

“DUI,” Josten said, picking off stringy cheese that fell from his fork onto his naked lap. “I was seeing this director on and off.”

 

“Gross,” Kevin said, thinking of wrinkly old fucks pawing at Josten’s gorgeously toned legs.

 

“Yeah. One time, he booty texted me while he was at a party. I went over to his place, but it turned out he was running late, so I drove around drunk in his neighborhood to wait for him until I sideswiped an off-duty cop.” He giggled.

 

Kevin laughed and dropped more penne into his mouth. “God, I’m so glad this is a one-time thing and we can just talk about all our messed up crap and then never have to see each other again.”

 

Josten snorted, bringing one slim leg up the chair to sit more comfortably. Kevin watched the motion. His legs were really something else. Kevin hadn’t quite realized how legs attached to a crotch that had a dick hanging off it would actually get a rise out of him.

 

Josten followed his gaze with a pointed cock of his feathery eyebrows as he stared down at Kevin’s tented boxers.

 

“I’ll get that.” He smirked and got on his knees.

 

Round three was back on his bed. Josten was like a coquettish insatiable minx as they fucked missionary style, with his hands crossed above his head. Kevin had never quite seen anyone so hairless. Josten didn’t even have hair around his peaked nipples, much less in his armpits. He slapped a hand over his crossed wrists and pushed them into the mattress, punctuating the movement with a sharp jab of his hips.

 

Josten groaned. “I like that.”

 

Kevin smirked at him. “Oh, girls love it.”

 

“I’m not a girl,” Josten replied, deadpan.

 

Kevin grabbed him and flipped him over and entered him again in one smooth, sharp motion. Josten moaned even louder.

 

“Fuck, that feels good too.”

 

He chased after his orgasm with Josten grinding and writhing into the bed, moaning out his release before collapsing over the rumpled bedclothes. Kevin wiped him down with a paper towel he found on his bedside table and sat up to pick up some clothes. Sex was awesome and he could probably go another round but he needed a smoke.

 

Josten limped out of the bed bonelessly to grab the robe he’d left on Kevin’s bedroom floor and followed him out to the balcony, seating his sore ass on the ledge and propping his feet up on Kevin’s lap as the two of them lit up and they smoked in silence for a moment while Kevin got his hands busy fiddling with the surprisingly slim arch of Josten’s feet. They didn’t feel like a man’s feet at all: he had slim toes and a delicate arch with very few calluses that Kevin fingered lightly, absently.

 

“You know,” he said quietly, flicking ash off the cherry of his cigarette far from Josten’s pretty, delicate feet. He could probably fit Cinderella shoes if he tried. “I started reading Allison’s email before she even broke up with me.” He stared off into the distant LA night so he wouldn’t have to think about how Josten’s nipples, which were absurdly rosy and peaked from the cool night air, were peeking from the gaps of the robe.

 

“Even though I had full warning, it still hit me like a ton of bricks when she broke it off,” he finished absently with a small sigh.

 

“Yeah, I get it. Relationships are hard,” Josten said and when he looked back at him, his blue eyes were filled with something that felt strange to Kevin. Empathy, maybe. Commiseration. Then he shrugged. “I heard. anyway. I’m not—I don’t do relationships.”

 

Kevin lowered his eyes and focused on the feet in his lap, tracing the green veins prominent against Josten’s insole. “Yeah, me too. I mean not since after Allison anyway.”

 

Josten snorted and flicked away his cigarette butt down the gulleys of the sloping Hollywood Hills. He let Kevin play with his feet for a while longer before he smiled impishly.

 

“So, are you one of those weirdos with a foot fetish?”

 

Kevin almost blushed and took his hands away. Almost. Josten’s feet were quite seriously arousing for a man’s feet.

 

“I’m not—I have nervous hands, okay? I can’t just be… idle… and not touch anything.”

 

Josten leered at him, his arousal evident as the robe parted slightly to reveal his half-hard cock. “I can think of a few things to keep your hands busy.”

 

So round four became Kevin finger-fucking Josten on the ledge of his balcony while Josten’s feet arched erotically against the arms of Kevin’s chair. His hands were white-knuckled as he gripped the ledge to keep himself from falling into the hillside below and Kevin learned about things like Josten’s prostate and how he could make him whimper and shudder deliciously in his arms when he pressed into it.

 

“God, that feels so good, don’t stop, you son of a bitch,” Josten babbled as Kevin stared down at his slender body, the robe completely falling away from his shoulders as he writhed in exquisite torture. Kevin couldn’t tear his eyes away from the fact that Josten’s cock was engorged and weeping and he hadn’t even touched himself. Kevin was pretty certain he could make him come just from his fingers—he seemed to be so painfully sensitive—but the lube was drying up since he’d wiped him down earlier.

 

Well then. Improvisation was the heart of success.

 

He grabbed Josten’s legs and braced them over his shoulders. He was so marvelously flexible as Kevin grasped him in the small of his back, fingers digging in to keep him from tipping over and falling, and spat directly into his hole to slick the passage of his fingers.

 

Josten stopped squirming. “Did you just spit into my asshole?”

 

Kevin looked up at his face. “Um, yeah.”

 

“Why?” he exclaimed, clearly horrified.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because I don’t spit into _my_ asshole!”

 

Kevin rolled his eyes. “It’s just saliva and if I licked my fingers and fucked you with them again, it’ll get there anyway, and besides, I didn’t see you complaining about getting your saliva in there after you blew me and I fucked you.”

 

Josten appeared to consider this for a moment. “You were wearing a condom though, but okay. Continue.”

 

He was blissfully fucked out of his mind and could barely walk after Kevin finished himself off over his saliva-slicked, red-rimmed hole and he had to carry him back inside and clean him up before putting him back on the bed because he could barely move and he mewled his complaints over his over-sensitized nether regions when the blanket fell over his body. Kevin didn’t think he could go another round himself. Four times felt like his balls had emptied out of sperm forever and he’d never get hard again (which was a lie, of course, because he’d probably been a sex demon in his previous life and, given some Gatorade and a protein bar, could probably be ready to fuck again in a few hours.)

 

He curled up on his side and watched Josten blink out of his post-coital haze and smiled almost fondly. Josten really was quite cute for a guy, especially when he did that slow hazy flutter of his dark eyelashes.

 

“Hey,” Kevin said softly, laying a tender hand on his cheek.

 

Josten smiled sleepily and kissed his palm. “Hey.”

 

They both blinked, surprised at the action. Kevin snatched his hand back and Josten cleared his throat. The spell was broken. Kevin shifted onto his back and Josten grinned nonsensically to himself.

 

“Am I glad I’m so drunk and doped up I’ll never remember this in the morning.”

 

“Well, I’m going to sleep,” he declared to no one in particular.

 

Josten huffed and shifted onto his other side. “Goodnight, Kevin.”

 

Kevin stared incredulously at his bare back. In the cold brightness of the moonlight filtering in from the wide expanse of the picture window in Kevin’s room, he could make out the faintest dusting of freckles on the knobs of Josten’s spine. There were also a few scattered moles that looked surprisingly sexy even though Kevin had never found moles attractive in his life, and odd-shaped scars that didn’t look like they came from fingernails digging into his back during sex. Kevin shook himself out of staring at his back and got up on his elbows.

 

“Goodnight? Really? Sorry, I don’t do sleepovers.”

 

Josten chuckled as he turned on his back, grinning. “I bet you’re not even gay, are you? Relax, I can barely walk right now; I’ll just sneak out in the morning.”

 

“Oh my god,” Kevin whined but obligingly lay back down and forced himself to shut his eyes against the unfamiliar warm sensation of having another body next to his to fall asleep against. He hadn’t had that since Allison broke it off almost three years ago. It was kind of nice, except Kevin Day didn’t do nice. “Whatever.”

 

“Goodnight, Kevin,” Josten said again with a sleepy yawn. He sounded amused.

 

Kevin mirrored him. Sleep sounded like such a wonderful thing, especially after such a spectacularly debauched end to what would have been an awful night had he not crossed paths with Josten.

 

“Goodnight, Neil.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in love with this TV series (Chris Geere is the most hilarious white man on TV) so much right now that I thought I needed to write an AFTG AU of it. And if you want to come yell at me about this fic, I'm on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mumuinc).
> 
> Ps. yes, Kevin definitely has a foot fetish in this fic.


	2. Trainwrecks don’t have brakes, Neil.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The day after an alcohol-fueled night of incredibly hot sex, Neil and Kevin just aren't having the best of days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: There is graphic sex between Ichirou/Neil described in this chapter. Also, graphic descriptions of drug use. Proceed with caution.
> 
> Much of the dialogue is still from _You're the Worst_ S1EP1.

Kevin woke and dressed himself blearily, and emerged from his room to the smell of homemade couscous and the sound of beef crackling in a pan as he picked up the paper on the wooden counter divider that separated the living room from his tiny dining area and kitchen. His roommate and one-time drug dealer, Jean Moreau, busied himself in the kitchen, scooping the couscous out into plates that were only marginally less tacky for not having prints of random vegetables or fruit in the center. He’d picked it up at a Dollar Central when he first moved to America and they’d been with him through college and his move to the glorious California suburbia once he’d gotten his book’s advance.

 

For all that Jean and Kevin had been at the same wedding party and presumably drank the same amount of alcohol, Jean looked surprisingly put together despite the fact that he was puttering about in Kevin’s kitchen wearing only a t-shirt and briefs. Kevin tried not to think about the fact that Jean’s pubic hair was peeking out of the leg-holes of his underpants. He felt better about him as a person if he didn’t need to see all the unmentionables hanging about. His head was pounding and if his brain actually went _there_ , he didn’t think he would have been able to peel himself away from the toilet.

 

“Good morning,” Jean greeted as Kevin tried his level best to ignore his existence and pulled up his iPad just as Jean set coffee on the table.

 

Kevin sipped the black life-sustaining liquid. Maybe if he surfed for porn enough, he could imagine Jean didn’t actually exist.

 

“So,” Jean said. Kevin wondered how he’d never managed to lose his accent despite spending half his life in America as far as Kevin knew, and the remaining years of his adulthood deployed in Iraq as part of the peacekeeping mission that followed the 9-11 war. Maybe being French and stupid meant one would never be able to shake one’s roots despite how badly one wanted to integrate into his country of choice. “I’ve been thinking about ghosts.”

 

That got a rise out of him and he looked up, half-grimacing as sunlight from the open windows assaulted his vision, and half-sneering at Jean’s general existence. “Ghosts? As in the thing that doesn’t exist because the human soul is a construct, a fallacy shoved down at the unsuspecting masses by money-grubbing TV evangelists?”

 

“Well yeah. I mean culturally, we French don’t really believe in ghosts but I figured I’ve tried literally everything I could to help me solve my problem and nothing’s ever worked, so what harm could this do?”

 

Kevin blinked up at him. He really should have put in his contact lenses before he got out of bed. “And by your problem, do you mean the fact that two years later, you’re still parked on your ass living here with me instead of getting your own place? Tell me, Jean, how exactly were you hoping that contact with some long-dead nonexistent mythological creature is going to help you move out of my house?”

 

Jean rolled his eyes, but looked at Kevin seriously. “No, I mean help me with my other problem. You know, the screaming and the nightmares and the voices in my head screaming at me that I need to get more heroin. Do you think it would get me anywhere? Maybe the wisdom of a thousand dead souls would help me get through the hot and cold flashes at night?”

 

Kevin scowled, remembering some distasteful memory of Allison describing how it felt when she got her period. “No.”

 

Jean snorted. “I think I’m going to do it anyway. Thanks.”

 

At this point, Kevin could really only roll his eyes. Jean was, as far as he could tell, clean. He hadn’t had a single hit of anything stronger than methadone since he’d invited himself to live in Kevin’s house when they ran into each other two years ago, with Kevin fresh out of a radio show discussing the release of his book and Jean shaking down his dealer when he couldn’t afford the 5 grams he needed to get him through withdrawal symptoms, but Kevin knew addicts, even recovering ones like Jean (or maybe especially people as crazy messed up as war vets like Jean) constantly still craved the drugs to make their brains go silent when the dark of the night pressed too close for comfort. It was why Kevin himself didn’t believe in the 7-step process in AA and why he had a shot of vodka for second breakfast to sustain him through the misery of his day, especially after the tragedy of him having Allison Reynolds for a girlfriend.

 

God, he could really use a shot right about now, after the moronic banality of morning conversation with Jean Moreau.

 

He’d been about to demand Jean to find the emergency vodka stash because he couldn’t see a single bottle left in the liquor cabinet, when another voice punctured the morning quiet of the apartment.

 

“Hey, why’d you let me sleep in so late?”

 

Kevin froze. Seriously? That little shit was still here? Now? He glanced back at Jean, whose eyes were as round as saucers, and shrugged, trying for casual.

 

As if to drive home the point that, indeed, the one-night stand he’d left the party with the previous night wasn’t just some absurd apparition conjured by Jean’s drug-fueled psychotic fantasy of talking to ghosts and Kevin was just the unwilling participant, Neil Josten climbed up the stairs wearing black booty pants that he’d probably convinced himself he looked attractive in (and okay, maybe he wasn’t wrong there) and a rumpled white dress shirt at least two sizes too big to be his—wait, fuck, was he wearing Kevin’s clothes from the night before?—rubbing his eyes blearily like a particularly skittish kitten, and commenting about Kevin’s gorgeous pad, before he sat himself at the table across from Kevin. Kevin goggled at him.

 

“Good morning,” Jean said, still sounding like he was stoned. Or maybe Kevin was stoned. This was the fucking Twilight Zone.

 

Josten flashed a smile that quickly devolved into a yawn and he stole a sip of Kevin’s coffee, moaning in delight. Kevin’s eyes widened.

 

“Morning,” he chirped, before dipping his fingers into Kevin’s food and stealing a bite. “Oh god, this is dynamite!”

 

Jean’s perpetually sleepy expression melted into a smile. “Thanks. I’m Jean. I’m Kevin’s roommate.”

 

“Neil.” He would’ve grabbed another handful to shovel into his mouth like a heathen had Kevin not slapped his hand away.

 

Good god, where had those fingers even been the previous night, and he was digging into Kevin’s food? Undeterred, Neil grabbed the plate and Kevin’s fork and started eating calmly, as if waking up in a stranger’s house and stealing their breakfast was something he just did everyday. Kevin scowled and Jean hurried behind the counter to grab another plate.

 

“So, where’d the two of you meet?” Josten asked conversationally, continuing to rudely help himself to Kevin’s coffee.

 

“Nowhere,” Kevin said, returning to his iPad in decided disinterest over mundane small talk.

 

“College,” Jean said at the same time.

 

Kevin scowled at him even more deeply and he grinned at Neil sheepishly. “Well, Kevin was in college and I was the guy that sold drugs to college kids. Oh, but Kevin’s been pretty nice to me. He gave me books to read because he saw untapped potential.”

 

Kevin made a face. “I gave you books I stole from dormers because I couldn’t afford to buy weed.”

 

“Semantics,” Jean said dismissively. He set another plate of couscous in front of Kevin and grabbed one of Kevin’s books sitting on the counter and set it in front of Neil. “Anyway, he got this book published. Sales have been a little flat and he’s already blown the entire advance on this house so that’s why he needs to do magazine work, but it’s actually pretty good. You should read it.”

 

“Nice,” Josten said, setting the book on his lap and digging into the food with gusto.

 

“At least buy your own copy,” Kevin whined. Both Josten and Jean guffawed.

 

“Yeah, no.” Josten smirked. “Anyway, which one of you is going to give me a ride to work?”

 

“Oh,” Jean said, “I can’t drive. I have PTSD and severe battle-induced psychosis that makes me see threats in basic everyday things I see on the street.”

 

Josten cocked an eyebrow at that and turned to Kevin. “Okay, I guess Kevin you’re up.”

 

Kevin was going to get permanent wrinkles if he kept scowling at everything and everyone so early in the day. “Wait, what? You sit here in my house, stealing my food and my coffee and you’re still expecting a ride to work? Anyway, that’s not happening. The valet wouldn’t give me my keys last night so my car’s still at the reception. We took a cab.”

 

“Nooo,” Josten moaned and grabbed his phone. “Damn it.”

 

* * *

 

Thirty minutes later, Neil Josten sat in the passenger seat of Jeremy Knox’s shiny silver Audi and found himself explaining in painful, excruciating detail why exactly he needed his best friend to come pick him up in said best friend’s half-sister’s ex-boyfriend’s house as he hurriedly swiped concealer over his eyebags to hide the smudges of the previous night’s eyeliner and alcohol-fueled bender as they sped through the streets of LA to get Neil to the record label’s office tower in the downtown where he worked. Jeremy kept interrupting him with shrill pithy one-liners (“Ew” was a favorite) as he drove.

 

“Oh my god, Neil, I can’t believe you slept with Kevin!”

 

Neil sniggered. “Apparently.”

 

“I told you he’s the worst! And you slept with him! On the night of my sister’s wedding!”

 

“Why’re you on my ass so much about this?”

 

“God, he’s such a jerk,” Jeremy exclaimed, ignoring Neil’s answers. “Did he say anything about me?”

 

“No, we didn’t even talk about you.”

 

“Ooh, Kevin is just the worst. Like remember how I told you he just completely swallowed Allison up when they were together. She’s never been the same after.”

 

“That’s because Allison has no personality to begin with,” Neil said with a smirk.

 

Jean side-eyed him. Neil knew his friend didn’t care enough about whatever it was that had broken off his sister’s relationship but Jeremy wasn’t so different from Allison in that he was obsessed with how other people perceived him. It didn’t help that their father didn’t quite know that his youngest child was gay (how that detail escaped anyone who met Jeremy and his hot twink ass, Neil would never understand. Jeremy was about as gay as they came, with his awful hipster fashion, and the lipgloss that was probably a huge giveaway. Neil himself would have probably tapped that and Jeremy wasn’t even his type.) Apparently, that obsession with ensuring that people only saw the facade of a straight, white boy-next-door extended to his best friend. With the way Jeremy was looking at him, it was best to disabuse him of the notion that Neil would ever fit into that neat heterosexual box with him early on.

 

“It was fun though,” he said with an impish grin.

 

“That’s disgusting,” Jeremy said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to do it again.”

 

Neil snorted. “Of course not.” He thought about it, slouching in his seat and putting his feet up. Kevin was awesome, probably some of the best sex Neil had ever had in years, even though he wouldn’t touch his dick. “Oh god, I hope he doesn’t think it was an actual thing.”

 

“Ew,” Jeremy agreed, then frowned. “Hey, can you put your feet down? And stop touching everything, you still have concealer on your hands. This car is a lease.”

 

Neil rolled his eyes but didn’t put up a fight when Jeremy shoved his feet off the dashboard with one hand, the other expertly maneuvering them through LA traffic. He could just about feel Jeremy’s side-eyed glance branding him with the turbulence of his thoughts.

 

“All right, stop the car.” When Jeremy didn’t immediately comply, he glowered at him until he pulled over.

 

“What?”

 

“I’d rather walk than sit here in this sterile suburban piece of crap while my best friend is being shitty and judgemental to me because I had sex with a guy at a wedding.” He folded his arms in front of his chest. “How many guys did you blow at our five-year reunion anyway? Bet your dad knows nothing about that.”

 

Jeremy cringed. “Four.”

 

Neil slapped his arm. “Four?! You told me three!”

 

“I mean I may have left out Dwayne Rogers from that nerdy board game org,” Jeremy said sheepishly.

 

“Eugh! I’m seriously nauseated!” Neil laughed.

 

Jeremy sighed. “We used to have so much fun.”

 

“Yeah, we did. Why’d you have to go and get married?”

 

Jeremy made a face. “I know. But you know how it is with my dad, right? Sorry.” He sat in silence for a moment before his irrepressible humor brightened again. “Do you like my new hair?”

 

Neil flicked a scathing glance at his normally messy mop of blonde curls. Today, Jeremy’s hair was cut neatly and slicked back like he was actually trying to look respectable instead of the skank he was 95% of the time.

 

“No, comb-backs make you look bald.” He sighed as Jeremy made another face and pulled back into traffic. “I swear if you get your real estate license and try to be respectable and pop out babies with your wife, I’m going to stab you in the nuts. This is like the height of anti-gay culture.”

 

Jeremy only let out a fake sob and drove on.

 

* * *

 

Mail was one of those boring adult things Kevin absolutely despised because it meant bills and mortgages and money flying out of his pocket for anything that didn’t contain 40% alcohol. His bare feet burned on the hot concrete as he stood in front of his mailbox sorting through the assortment of credit card bills, Jean’s official correspondence with the VA, and other spam that would have served better as kindling for arson. There was nothing quite as mundane as having to sort through evidence of one’s advancing years as looking through all the garbage the US Postal System managed to stuff into a metal box the size of a rat trap.

 

He would’ve happily chucked all that waste of trees into the trash if one envelope in particular didn’t catch his attention. Kevin stared at the postmark from his publisher for a long minute before eagerly tearing into the envelope and flipping over the check it contained.

 

Well, fuck.

 

He tried to see if there was anything else in the envelope that would have restored his faith in humanity, but the check was all it contained and the glaring two-digit value printed on its face felt like an insult to his intelligence.

 

“Hi.”

 

Kevin scowled and turned around, momentarily forgetting the pathetic check in the pile of spam. There was a tall dark-haired boy of about twelve or thirteen years old tugging a trolley school bag and standing across the street behind him.

 

“What?” he demanded, pulling out the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

 

The kid watched him with undisguised interest. “I just moved in,” he said, pointing to a house down the road in a cul de sac. “Over there.”

 

Kevin made a face. “Of course you did.”

 

“Why do you say that?” the kid asked, squinting against the bright sunlight probably reflecting on Kevin’s impossibly pale skinny legs.

 

“Because the death of any interesting neighborhood is the influx of white procreators,” he complained, deadpan.

 

“Oh,” the kid said, brightening. “That’s cool. My nutritionist is gay too.”

 

“I’m not gay!” Kevin exclaimed defensively. How did this little pipsqueak even pick up on him sleeping with that one blip of a boy in his radar the previous night? It wasn’t like he and Josten had been particularly noisy fuckers. “I’m English.” He turned back to his mailbox to see if there were any other checks in the mail. To hell with snotty, overly perceptive twelve-year-olds. How was this kid not yet in school anyway? It was already 11am.

 

“What’s that?” the boy asked, apparently relentless in driving Kevin absolutely nuts with his inane small talk questions.

 

Kevin decided to humor him. “A royalty check for my book for seventeen dollars and fifty eight cents. You know, if there was any doubt that the book industry was dead, it is here in my hands.” He crumpled the check and balled it up. “RIP literature. 2000 BC to this moment.”

 

“Wanna hang out sometime?”

 

Kevin glanced back, surprised that the boy was still there and that he’d already crossed the street and was standing and squinting directly from behind him.

 

“What?” He couldn’t help turning back around fully and sneering down at the sordid little fucker. “What are you even talking about? I’m an adult. Do you realize what that means? It means that I’m beset upon at all times by a tsunami of complex thoughts and struggles, unceasingly aware of my own mortality, and able to contemplate the futility of everything. And yet still rage against the dying of the light. So do you see how monumentally stupid you, a child, asking me ‘Do you want to hang out sometime?’ is?”

 

The boy shrugged. “My dad designs video games. We get all the new ones early.”

 

Kevin stood there, stupefied, for a moment, then he shrugged too. “Come over around eight.”

 

The kid beamed up at him and he rolled his eyes, making back for his door. He wasn’t standing around the street anymore for fear of having other neighbors attempt small talk. These white suburban Americans were stupid.

 

* * *

 

Neil burst through the door to the roofdeck of his office building to find his main clients, Aaron Minyard and Nicky Hemmick, messing around with their skateboards as if nothing had happened and it was just a normal day at Foxhole Records, as if they hadn’t just trashed the set of their last photoshoot from the day before, and completely destroyed the camera and equipment of the label’s go-to photographer, Abby Winfield. He marched to where Aaron was attempting to flip his skateboard, stomped on one end of it, sending Aaron stumbling back, grabbed the board and hurled it behind him, where it clattered uselessly against the door.

 

“What the fuck just happened?” he demanded, pissed off beyond belief. Nicky wasn’t even paying attention to him, too busy messing with his phone, trying to capture a panoramic shot of West Hollywood.

 

“You know I get nervous at this shit,” Aaron intoned, as if everything wrong in the world was Neil’s fault.

 

“What? So you pay a girl to take your picture and then you trash her studio? What the fuck kind of brain-addled asshole does shit like that?”

 

“You weren’t there!” Aaron yelled. “Unprofessional as shit! A publicist who can’t show up at publicity events? What the hell am I even paying you for, Josten?”

 

Neil grimaced, shoving his sunglasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “Oh quit whining. The label pays me.”

 

“You know I’ll discharge on my end, bitch. The label is a fucking villain.” He scowled at Neil, blonde eyebrows knitting together like a comically albino Marvel superhero. “From now on, I’ll just drop free mixtapes and vines of my fucking hamster. You’ll like _that_ , wouldn’t you?”

 

Neil let out a frustrated breath. Aaron had a point. He needed him on the label to keep his job. The Monsters was easily his single biggest client. Still, that didn’t give him license to act like a complete douchetit because he was uncomfortable at a photoshoot.

 

“You need to apologize to Abby before she sues your skinny ass,” he muttered.

 

“So what? I’ll lawyer the hell up.”

 

“Aaron, Abby’s a great photographer! I don’t want to lose her because you’re throwing some shitty-ass temper tantrum because I’m not around to wipe your poopy ass or change your pampers!”

 

“Anyone’s a good photographer now,” Aaron whinged. “Nicky just has his stupid dinky phone and he take good Instagram photos.”

 

“No filter,” Nicky smirked, training his phone camera on the overpriced Yeezys on his feet.

 

Neil felt nauseated. He was still nursing a bitch of a hangover, getting down from the most awful speedballs high after his best friend chewed him off on the drive over for sleeping with Kevin Day of all people, and to top it off, his whole body felt like he’d been hit by a freight train—what the fuck did Kevin do to him anyway? He wondered where he could hit up more of that…

 

Rolling his eyes at his fucked up reaction to Allison’s ex, he pushed his sunglasses up his head like a headband and went to pick up Aaron’s skateboard, and shoved it against his chest. “Are you going to apologize to Abby or am I going to have to destroy your sad little life?”

 

Twenty minutes later, the three of them stood in the middle of Abby’s aforementioned destroyed studio set, a mock look of contrition on Aaron’s face as Neil stood off to the side, arms folded in front of his chest, waiting for Aaron to talk.

 

“We’re sorry we broke your shit,” Aaron said to Abby in the most stilted sounding insincere apology known to man.

 

“Oh my god,” Abby huffed, throwing up her hands.

 

Neil sneered at her, picking up the broken remnants of her dead camera and handing it back to her. “Great. Abby, we’ll talk about restitution later.”

 

Abby shook her head in disbelief and left to pack whatever else was salvageable of her equipment. Aaron grimaced at Neil, who scowled up at his expectant face.

 

“What?”

 

Aaron shook his head, but his voice was quiet when he spoke. “What the hell were you doing anyway?”

 

“Nothing worth mentioning,” Neil muttered, mind still on the previous night’s bender and Kevin’s awesome apartment on the Hollywood Hills. He tried not to focus on the fact that he was in jail right about the time of Aaron’s publicity event.

 

“You still need to make it up to us,” Aaron declared. “I’ll fire your ass and it won’t mean shit to me.”

 

Neil frowned. “Yes, it will.”

 

“I’m serious. You owe me, Neil.”

 

“Okay, Aaron,” Neil huffed. Anything to get this faux concern off anyone who even looked at him twice. “What do you need?”

 

Aaron rolled his eyes, easily understanding that Neil didn’t want to talk about whatever was plaguing him. “You need to kiss my lily white boy ass.” Neil smirked and Aaron’s eyebrows knitted again. “And you need to get me cocaine. I’m too famous to get it myself.”

 

Neil guffawed. “Right.”

 

“I’m not playing. You’re on probation now.”

 

And then he turned, pointedly ignoring Neil in favor of joining Nicky’s animated conversation with one of the pretty backup dancers milling about on the studio set. Neil stared after them, and it was like watching his life flash before his eyes.

 

Shit.

 

* * *

 

Kevin sat at his dining table contemplating the crumpled check he’d brought in with the assortment of bills from the mail. The amount printed on the check and his name printed next to it felt like the rudest fuck you taunt the universe couldn’t seem to help throwing in his face for his efforts to to do something productive with his life besides being a grocery stock boy at the local Tesco in his hometown outside Manchester in London. Maybe there were worse things besides getting a pathetic royalty check for less than twenty dollars in the mail. He turned the check over and signed his name to deposit it in his account when Jean burst through the door, slapping his car keys onto the counter and grinning maniacally at him.

 

“I managed to get your car towed from reception and then look who I found getting out of a cab off the curb.”

 

As if his day wasn’t the lowest it could possibly have been, his previous night’s tryst emerged from behind Jean’s large form. Neil Josten, his red hair tamed to almost a semblance of human dignity, smiled at him tentatively and wiggled his fingers hello.

 

“Don’t worry, I just forgot my bag,” he said, still smiling, by way of explanation for his presence. “Not on purpose or anything.”

 

Kevin stared at him in dumb-founded aggravation for a moment and pointedly turned back to his pile of bills. Jean blinked at the awkward tension.

 

“I’m going to leave you two alone now.”

 

Josten waited until the quiet click of Jean’s bedroom door announced privacy for the conversation. “He’s sweet. It’s nice of you to let him live here.”

 

Kevin turned back at him. “Do you know that your bag had food it in it? It was covered in ants. Who even brings a bag to a wedding?”

 

Josten frowned. “Whoa, what’s your problem?”

 

“I had a really shitty day.” Kevin glared up at him as he stood in the hallway. “And then I come home to find that my bedroom had become the scene from a fifties sci-fi movie. And why would you even stay over, huh? It’s such an amateur move.”

 

“You know what, you’re right,” Josten said. “Here I was thinking you would get the wrong idea about last night, so thank you for saving me the speech.”

 

Kevin stared at him incredulously. “You were going to make a speech?”

 

Josten rolled his eyes and turned away. “Forget it.”

 

“Yeah, save your breath,” Kevin said, because he always got the last word.

 

Neil stopped in his tracks and suddenly rushed back. “I don’t know what planet you’re from but where I come from, someone like you—” he looked Kevin scathingly up and down “—doesn’t just get _this_.”

 

Kevin snorted as Josten gestured at his (admittedly hot) body wrapped in skinny jeans and a leather biker jacket. Josten wasn’t done though.

 

“So congratulations, you bagged a weakened gazelle. That’s right, I’m still stupid enough to hit someone eons further than you on the evolutionary scale except maybe in terms of unearned ego and back fat.” Kevin sat with his mouth hanging open as Josten went on in his tirade. “Oh, what, you so value honesty that you had to go chew a bride out on her wedding day in the name of it? Well why don’t you face this, giant-hunger-for-truth Kevin: there’s a fat asterisk next to my name in your little skank-to-bone list and it reads ‘He probably would have gone home with anyone that night’! So thank you. Thank you for my wake up call! You are officially on my bottom!”

 

With that, he grabbed his bag from the counter and flounced away, leaving Kevin staring after his back and wondering what had just happened. His pants felt uncomfortably tight. Fuck, Josten was hot when he was mad.

 

* * *

 

Neil stood, motionless, in front of the beautifully manicured lawn of the Calabasas mansion before him. He’d grabbed Kevin’s car keys next to his bag on the counter and decided to take his revenge by driving the silver BMW 3 series around town back to his own apartment in a shitty walk-up, where he sat in the shower for three hours, scrubbing the evidence of Kevin’s touch from under his fingernails, before finally dragging himself out into the gathering dusk and dressing in one of his nicest suit jackets and getting back into Kevin’s car.

 

It was getting late, but he still needed to settle Aaron’s cocaine problem or he was never going to hear the end of it.

 

He didn’t think he would be back here after the week he’d had. This was the exact neighborhood he’d told Kevin about, where he’d been arrested for DUI, and the man he’d been seeing hadn’t even bailed him out. What an asshole. (Of course, Neil had never bothered calling him to tell him he’d been arrested, but that was beside the point.)

 

He squared his shoulders and climbed up the steps leading to the mansion’s front door. Maybe he was doomed to sleep with the same boring old men with too much money and an endless supply of illegal drugs for petty clients who did nothing but enable all the worst of his habits. At least he wasn’t drunk this time and he hadn’t gotten Kevin’s car wrecked on the drive over.

 

Or maybe that was his mistake. He _wasn’t_ drunk enough for the kind of sex-for-drugs encounter this night was bound to lead to.

 

The door opened a crack a few minutes after he knocked and a moment later, Ichirou Moriyama’s perpetually youthful face greeted him with a bewildered smile as he opened the door wider to gather Neil into his arms, and he kissed Neil so thoroughly Neil had to push the gum in his mouth against the back of his teeth lest he swallowed it. Ichirou kissed like such an awful boring old man and he wasn’t even fifty.

 

“Neil,” he breathed as Neil pulled away a little uneasily and let himself in. “I have an early call time, but someone as beautiful as you is always welcome here.”

 

Ichirou’s mansion smelled like something floral and sterile, like the inside of a morgue maybe, when the coroner was desperate to get rid of the smell of formaldehyde by spraying green tea-scented air freshener on all the drapes. Okay, maybe not a morgue but a mortician’s office. It was distasteful and it turned Neil’s stomach.

 

Ichirou smiled at him obliviously as he shrugged out of his coat. “I didn’t know if you wanted to see me again after you didn’t show up the last time.”

 

Neil hid his grimace with a strained smile. “Of course I wanted to see you again.”

 

What a fucking bald-faced lie. He couldn’t stand how messed up Ichirou’s presence in his life made him and he predicted he’d be naked and on his back in less time than it took for Ichirou’s household help to get Neil’s jacket. Ichirou Moriyama didn’t like wasting time on meaningless pleasantries when some desperate pretty face showed up on his doorstep, eager to suck his cock.

 

He was, unfortunately, not mistaken when not an hour later, he lay on his stomach in Ichirou’s bed. He’d lost his dress shirt and pants somewhere in the climb up the stairs to the palatial master bedroom and his underwear hung precariously at the edge of the gigantic king bed as Ichirou rutted lazily against his ass. Neil couldn’t, for the life of him, understand why Ichirou fucked like a geriatric praying mantis, gasping in the sterile air for trite adjectives to describe Neil’s sore ass. He’d lost his erection twenty minutes ago when the lube dried in his asshole because Ichirou’s idea of foreplay involved quoting a fucking thesaurus, trying to describe what a “lovely, pliant thing” Neil was as he pawed his legs with leather-gloved fingers like he couldn’t imagine touching skin with his bare hands. Neil was almost surprised he wasn’t wearing disposable surgical gloves and actually favored shit he could wear more than once.

 

“Hey,” he said as Ichirou let out a magnificent (fake-sounding) groan as he continued to grind lazily. Who the fuck wore condoms—two of them, one on top of another!—while  rutting? “Can we take a little break?”

 

Ichirou’s pleasure-glazed eyes stared down at him a moment before he lowered himself to his side and kissed Neil’s shoulder chastely. Jesus H. Christ.

 

“Of course,” he said, moving to lie back down amidst the expensive Tempur pillows covered in silk. It was the tackiest shit Neil had ever seen and he had to remind himself he wanted to be here in this million-dollar bedroom with this grossly uninteresting man because… well, because he wanted it. Not like he had a job to do or anything.

 

He wriggled onto his side, watching Ichirou’s profile, wondering what he could do to make this boring booty call marginally interesting and worth his while. Ichirou was such a yawn and if they didn’t do anything fun like him fucking Neil to Mars and back maybe, he was going to fall asleep and then where would that lead him in the evening’s quest for cocaine?

 

“So,” Neil said when Ichirou remained silent, “tell me what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

 

Ichirou’s slanted eyes flickered for a moment to look at him. “Oh Neil, you know I no longer deal with negativity anymore, not since Kyoto.”

 

Neil had no idea what he was talking about, but maybe it had something to do with when Ichirou disappeared from the limelight for a year after his last movie was awarded a Razzie for having a -75% review rating on Rotten Tomatoes. He’d heard Ichirou had gone on a pilgrimage and he hadn’t been the same since. He’d become this unimaginative, tedious hack who fucked so slowly, bees died before he could come.

 

“I once set my high school on fire to get out of a Math test,” he confided, grinning, remembering Kevin smiling back at him the previous night when he’d told him the story of how he’d gotten crabs from his guidance counselor.

 

Ichirou stared at him in polite horror. “That’s awful, Neil! Why would you tell me those things?”

 

Neil rolled his eyes, but only after he’d turned away to make sure Ichirou didn’t see him. “Oh, never mind.”

 

He heaved a silent sigh and wormed himself under the sheets, determined to have his fun even if Ichirou was about as interesting as watching paint drying on a suburban picket-fenced wall. He stripped off Ichirou’s two layers of rubber and took him in his mouth, only gagging at the awful taste of lubricant and definitely, that reaction had nothing to do with the cock hitting the back of his throat. At least Ichirou was still hard, so this wasn’t going to take very long.

 

Ichirou strained against his mouth, incredibly mindful not to buck up, as he moaned loudly. “Neil, you’re marvellous… oh god, that’s terrific!”

 

Neil wished he would lay off the adjectives—they were vaguely disturbing, like he was fucking an audio book of a romance novel that coincidentally had a working cock hanging out of the screen of his Kindle. There had to be something in this encounter that neither of them had ever done before.

 

His mind wandered back to the previous night’s exploits with Kevin fucking him with his hand, the cool night air in his balcony, and had an idea. He pulled back from the cock in his mouth and spat to slick it it all up.

 

Ichirou stopped straining and pulled the blanket off Neil’s head.

 

“Did you just spit on me?” He didn’t look angry but Neil could feel the cocaine practically slipping from his fingertips.

 

“No. Yes.” He grinned sheepishly. “Sorry.”

 

He resumed what he was doing before Ichirou could change his mind and decided to get angry, deep-throating him so hard he wouldn’t been surprised if his throat was branded with an imprint of Ichirou’s dick, until he pulsed and strained and emptied himself into Neil’s waiting mouth. Neil wiped his lips with the back of his hand and tugged off the blanket entirely.

 

“Hey, do you still have anymore cocaine?”

 

* * *

 

Matt Boyd, the kid of the cul de sac home, wasn’t kidding about getting new video games early. When he rang Kevin’s door at 7:30, he had a copy of _A Way Out_ , which wasn’t due for release until March the following year. The two of them continued to play the game into the late evening as Matt showed Kevin the ropes of breaking out of prison, video game style, while Kevin slowly drank himself into a stupor with some leftover brandy he’d found hiding on the bottom shelf of his fridge. Sometimes, he wondered what other lunatic ideas Jean managed to plant in that heroin-soaked brain of his whenever he tried to hide alcohol from Kevin.

 

Jean stomped up the stairs an hour after Kevin and Matt started playing and stood in front of Kevin for a moment, trying to get his attention.

 

“I need to talk to you.”

 

“Can’t,” Kevin muttered as he took a swig of his brandy, when a cutscene interrupted their players’ attempts at futile escape. “I’m busy.”

 

Jean gave an exasperated puff of breath and snatched his controller away. Kevin scowled.

 

“What’s wrong with you? Give me the controller.” He got up to make a grab for it. Jean merely shoved him back into the couch, using his superior strength to keep Kevin down.

 

“No. I’ve watched you for two years now get girls to come home with you and they’re always gone in the morning.”

 

“Sorry,” Kevin said. “I can’t help it if Josten refused to leave.” Jean merely cocked an eyebrow as he held out his hand. “Give me my controller.”

 

“No.”

 

“Fine,” he huffed and grabbed the other one from Matt and started messing with the buttons pointedly to ignore Jean.

 

Jean snorted. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said and dropped the one in his hand  to grab Kevin from behind in a headlock. “I don’t mind you being a jerk to me because I know you care. But Neil stayed. You say he forced you but you and I both know there’s not a person on this planet that’s ever had a good outcome trying to force you to do anything. He stayed, Kevin! That counts for something!” He stopped tightening his arm around Kevin’s neck only when Kevin stopped sputtering and struggling. “I’m gonna let you go now.”

 

Kevin scrambled back to his feet, ignoring Matt as he sneakily grabbed his controller in time for the cutscene to end. “Why would I even listen to you, eh? You’re a mental case. You’re on like a billion medication that all say ‘Take for batshit craziness’.”

 

“I was defending our country,” Jean said quietly.

 

“All you were really defending is the business interests of evil men,” Kevin sneered.

 

“Kevin, this country _is_ the business interest of evil men,” Jean reasoned.

 

Kevin slapped his forehead. “You know, that may be the most intelligent thing you’ve ever said.”

 

Jean blinked at him slowly and Kevin wondered if he was stoned. “Thanks.”

 

“That’s a cop-out,” Kevin muttered, rolling his eyes and making for the door.

 

“Hey, wait, where are you going?”

 

“To a bar, where I can drink in peace,” Kevin yelled, glancing down at Matt. “Come on, Boyd.”

 

Matt ignored him as Jean settled into the couch and the two of them resumed playing in Kevin’s stead. It only took a two-second explosion on the screen before Kevin came rushing back inside.

 

“Alright, call the police.”

 

“On me?” Jean asked, glancing up from the TV.

 

“No, someone stole my car!”

 

“Oh,” Jean said. “No, Neil took it.”

 

“Wait, what? Neil took my car?!” Kevin exploded.

 

Jean nodded, returning his attention to the game. “Yeah, I saw him driving it away earlier and I figured maybe you loaned it to him.” He sat back into the couch and stared up at the way blood drained from Kevin’s face. “Come to think of it, that’s kind of weird, considering he yelled at you before he left.”

 

“He just lost his license!” Kevin shrieked, his voice cracking, not quite believing something like this was actually happening to him. Why the fuck couldn’t he catch a break on this shitty day?

 

Jean sniggered. “Well, he must’ve stolen your keys from the counter. You gotta admit: it’s kind of a ballsy move.”

 

Kevin exhaled loudly as he collapsed back into the couch. Fuck, this day was such a nightmare. Beside him, sitting on the floor, Matt grinned, nodding absently at the game.

 

“You guys are fun.”

 

* * *

 

Neil wandered the upstairs floors of Ichirou’s house absently. Ichirou had gone to prepare for his early call time and left Neil with instructions on where to find one of his secret stashes of drugs in the house. Neil found the small wooden box of white powder in one of the upstairs bathrooms and he settled himself in Ichirou’s giant white tub as he poured the contents of the box into a clear plastic ziplock baggie. There’d be enough there to last Aaron and Nicky a good week without Neil having to crawl back into this sterile mansion to fuck its owner for more for a good long while.

 

He blinked up at the bathroom door, expecting cops to come breaking it down, but nothing happened. Nothing ever happened.

 

He sighed and looked down at the white powder. There was a slim steel nail file in the box, probably used to cut the powder into lines. He scooped a tiny mound on the tip of the nail file and sniffed, blinking when his eyes watered at the sensation of coke rushing up his nostril. He wanted maybe a second hit on the other nostril to round out a pleasant high that he could spend in that lonely tub when his phone rang.

 

He stared stupidly at the unknown number for a minute before picking it up. “Hello?”

 

“What are you up to?” Kevin’s deep voice filled the other end of the line, a sleepy accented drawl like the slow drip of honey as the drug coursed through Neil’s system.

 

He sniffed and rubbed his nose, suddenly feeling guilty. “Nothing. Just… reading.”

 

“Hey, you won’t believe this: someone stole my car.”

 

“Oh,” Neil said, slapping a hand to his forehead. He’d almost forgotten that little detail out of all the shit he’d done for the day. “That’s awful.”

 

“Right?” Kevin said. Absurdly, Neil thought he could hear a smile in his voice. “Now I have to go file a police report in the morning.”

 

“I—I may have borrowed it,” Neil stammered. There was nothing salvageable about this situation: he was sitting in an empty bathtub trying to get high on cocaine that was meant for his clients and Kevin was going to call the fucking cops on him by morning.

 

“I know,” Kevin said, still sounding amused.

 

“Well, sorry. I told you I’m the worst.”

 

Kevin huffed. “Actually, no. You said _I_ was the worst and that I was lucky to get you.”

 

“Yeah.” Neil bit his lip. “About that…”

 

“Oh, don’t apologize; it was a great speech. It was funny and true. And mean.” Kevin paused for a moment before continuing in a much quieter voice, “My favorite kind.”

 

Neil bit his lip harder as a hesitant smile clawed its way through his lips. Maybe there was something interesting about this night after all.

 

“I set my high school on fire to get out of a Math test,” he blurted out, the same line he’d been hoping for validation from Ichirou.

 

Kevin giggled on the other line. “That’s genius. Oh, um… I liked you. Before.” If Neil was a thirteen-year-old, he might have blushed, but he was twenty-eight, and on his way to a pretty good coke high so he smiled to himself and let Kevin dig his own grave. “I do have a foot thing.”

 

“Seriously?” He couldn’t help the little smile now blossoming wider on his face.

 

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “In fact, I was just trying to find the right clip online to—you know, set so I could fall asleep. Nothing seemed quite right though.”

 

He heard the innuendo and imagined Kevin waggling his eyebrows at him. He got up on his haunches and climbed out of the tub, pressing his phone closer to his ear. “Ooh, do you want me to try?”

 

Kevin was silent for a while before Neil heard the rustling of bedclothes. “What?”

 

“Hush, I’m thinking,” Neil said, pushing out of the bathroom. Ichirou’s upstairs bathroom opened into a second story garden with a lap pool. The lights from the water reflected random shapes onto the large glass panel sliding doors. It was peaceful here, quiet, beautiful even, now that Ichirou was probably out of the house.

 

“God, this is stupid,” Kevin groused, but Neil could tell he was definitely smiling now if he wasn't before.

 

Neil took a breath and started: “I have been walking around all day in these shoes that are just—” He paused and pitched his voice low and breathy. “Hot and tight.”

 

He heard the hitch in Kevin’s voice before he said, “Oh yeah. Go on.”

 

“And my socks are just so… sweaty.”

 

There was dead air on the other line for a moment before Kevin replied, “That happens.”

 

Neil grinned at the awkward pause. “I think I may just have to take them off.”

 

“You do that,” Kevin said, the smile back in his voice.

 

Neil grinned nonsensically to himself, clutching the sleeve of the borrowed hoodie he’d swiped from Ichirou’s walk-in closet. This was crazy, weirder than that one time he’d drunk-sexted Aaron and Aaron had called him and chewed him out for two hours that he wasn’t gay. Hell, Kevin probably wasn’t gay either, and yet Neil couldn’t keep this absurd attraction to himself.

 

“Hey,” Kevin said, voice gone quiet once again. “You’re very nice for doing this.”

 

“Yeah,” Neil said breathlessly. “I am… very nice… Kevin…” He bit his lip and fidgeted. “I’m scared of this shit, you know? I don’t like it.”

 

“I don’t believe in it at all,” Kevin said, picking up perfectly that Neil wasn’t referring to the fact that they were about to engage in kinky phone sex together.

 

“So, if we both know it can’t work, then there’s no harm… right?”

 

“Right,” Kevin agreed, voice barely above a whisper. Then unbelievably, he said, “So, what kind of socks?”

 

Neil blinked, utterly relieved. His cheeks hurt from smiling so much. “Knee high basketball socks, with um, orange and green stripes.”

 

“You’re crazy,” Kevin laughed. “You’re nineteen different types of trouble, but crazy.”

 

Neil turned and sat down by the pool’s edge, his free hand dipping into the water. “Yeah, so are you. Nineteen different types.” _All of them mine_ , he didn’t say. “Well, it’s late. Did you finish?”

 

Kevin huffed another laugh. “The moment’s gone though, isn’t it?”

 

“All right. Have a good night,” Neil said, unable to keep from laughing himself. Basketball socks were disgusting and tacky and just the right kind of awful. “Call me,” he couldn’t help adding.

 

“I will,” Kevin said, and Neil couldn’t stop smiling.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a summary of all the new characters introduced in this monster of a chapter:  
> Jean is Kevin's drug-addled war veteran roommate  
> Jeremy is Neil's ditzy best friend who got married so his and Allison's dad won't find out he's gay.  
> Aaron and Nicky are Neil's famous rap duo clients  
> Abby is a celebrity photographer  
> Ichirou is the director Neil mentioned he was seeing on and off in the first chapter  
> Matt is the child of Kevin's next-door neighbors.
> 
> Everyone, except Matt, Aaron and Nicky, is aged up in this fic. Neil and Jeremy are 28, Kevin and Jean are 33. Allison is 32. Ichirou is 45. Aaron is 21, Nicky is 23, and Matt is 13.
> 
> All of them are awful and there's no character growth to be had.
> 
> Hit me up on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mumuinc) if you want to yell at me about my fics.


	3. Gay and bisexual are totally different things.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basically, Kevin realizes sleeping with another man means he's not entirely heterosexual and has a conniption about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a public holiday where I'm at, so have another chapter before I go back to the daily drudgery of my job.
> 
> This chapter is based on S1EP2, with most of the funny dialogue obviously coming from the show. I tweaked the whole episode's issue about Gretchen getting her period. It deals with character issues about being gay, and frankly, isn't handled very well, because, well, that's how they're written. I should hope I don't have to psa that I don't believe or react to lgbtq this way myself.

Kevin’s room was a smoky riot of abandoned chip wrappers and discarded unwashed underwear. Neil tapped out the cherry of his cigarette on a dirty shot glass as he crawled slowly into bed wearing a t-shirt and borrowed briefs he’d swiped from the clean laundry pile by the washing area door. He’d had the fleeting flash of embarrassment color his cheeks when he was rummaging through the pile of clothes at stealing Jean’s underwear, but Kevin wouldn’t let him borrow his boxers because it made him uncomfortable having another person’s jizz on the crotch of his underpants and Neil wasn’t allowed to walk around naked in Kevin’s apartment after the one time he wandered out of the bathroom naked and Kevin almost had a heart attack.

 

That was just the inconvenience of sleeping with someone too attached to their perceived heterosexuality. Neil had gotten used to that reaction after blowing through a frat house of straight college boys that one time Jeremy had dared him when they were still in school. It wasn’t a huge deal and Kevin didn’t care anyway so long as Neil kept himself covered at all times they weren’t having sex, which really wasn’t very often at all. God, he was still sore from the three times Kevin had fucked him all that afternoon, but it was fun and wild and Kevin didn’t give a flying fuck about any of Neil’s issues so he kept putting out like a good little bitch… maybe he really ought to stop hanging around Aaron and Nicky. Even in his head, he was thinking like a lame white boy street thug.

 

The aforementioned prissy, homophobic owner of the room was still naked and asleep, having completely worn himself out. Sleeping Kevin was Neil’s favorite Kevin because then, he couldn’t open his mouth to be unintentionally offensive with his lack of a filter and tolerance for Neil’s gay ass and his stupid adherence to telling the truth about how he felt about it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Neil knew there was something fundamentally wrong with him that he continued to see someone for a week running and that person wasn’t even comfortable with who he really was, but the endless mind-blowing sex was a good deterrent to thinking about all the problematic issues surrounding this long-running tryst.

 

He stubbed out his cigarette on the overflowing ashtray on the nightstand and crawled on top of Kevin to better contemplate the man currently turning his life to shit. Kevin wasn’t like many of the men Neil had been with in recent years. For one, he was so damn pale, it was like having sex with a ghost. Neil had had enough sex with white boys with gross orange tans to last him a lifetime of ruined sheets whenever the spray tan inevitably wound up on the sheets instead of skin. Kevin wasn’t particularly handsome either, although maybe there was something charming about how he wasn’t perfect-looking, with his unathletic build and skinny wrists. Jeremy had once told him about how Allison used to complain that Kevin preferred sitting in a bar during the day-time to drink while Jeremy fucked all the beefcake men he could find on Grindr. Hell, Jean, with his perpetually dilated stoner pupils, had a hotter ass than Kevin, and that was really saying something if a junkie could be hotter than someone who constantly appeared as if he had his life put together (even though for all Neil knew, Kevin really didn’t.)

 

Kevin’s nose twitched and his eyelids fluttered open just as Neil was about to touch his mouth. He blinked, a little hazily, surprised at the proximity of Neil’s face.

 

“What?” he demanded, because Kevin was a control freak and he needed to know exactly what was going on at all times (except where it related to Jean’s masturbation habits in the common bathroom when he took a bath, and because Kevin hogged the en suite bathroom in the morning, Neil was unfortunately very well acquainted with Jean’s jack-off schedule.)

 

He opened his mouth to say the first thing he thought about (that had nothing to do with Jean because while Neil enjoyed the morning show, Kevin was the sort of special snowflake that was far too easily offended and he didn’t want vomit on the lone clean shirt he could find in Kevin’s laundry pile) and came up blank so he did the most natural thing that felt to him: he lied.

 

“You’re losing your hair,” he blurted out, punctuating the lie with a hand running through Kevin’s hair carelessly.

 

If he thought Kevin wasn’t narcissistic about his nonexistent good looks, he was sorely mistaken. “Why would you say that to me?”

 

Neil adopted a look of feigned innocence. “I’m practicing.”

 

“Practicing what? Dying alone?”

 

“I’m practicing being honest,” Neil said loftily.

 

“Well, go do it somewhere else,” Kevin groused, slapping his hand away from his hair.

 

“But you’re always so honest and I admire that about you.” Neil pouted. “I’m a giant liar, always have been.”

 

“Always?”

 

“I once told the Spice Girls that I was dying of brain cancer so I could get concert tickets.”

 

Kevin laid a hand around his neck patronizingly. “Neil, dishonesty to spare someone’s feelings belittles everyone involved. Dishonesty to get free stuff is just smart and economic.”

 

“Thanks,” Neil said, grinning, and planted a kiss on Kevin’s nose.

 

He made to pull away, mission accomplished at getting the attention he wanted, but Kevin grabbed him and held him firmly in his arms, kissing him enthusiastically as his fingers wandered beneath the waistband of the borrowed briefs. He wriggled away, laughing, but Kevin refused to relinquish his hold, pressing his half-hard arousal underneath the sheets against Neil’s thigh.

 

“Oh my god, noooo,” Neil laughed, finally managing to squirm away just as Kevin made grabby hands at him. “I’m going to get latex poisoning if we keep going any more today.”

 

“I’ll be really quick, you won’t even notice,” Kevin promised.

 

Neil snorted. “Nice try. I learned blue balls was a myth when I was twelve.”

 

“You’re a traitor to our gender, Josten,” Kevin called after him as he hurried to escape into the bathroom.

 

When he was done, he returned to the bedroom to find Kevin still going, keeping himself occupied with his right hand under the blanket. Neil leaned against the dresser, crossing his arms in feigned boredom. How anyone could just keep going like Kevin did was beyond him. He was literally the personification of the Energizer bunny.

 

“Look at you, you’re like an animal,” he said, watching with a studiously deadpan look on his face. “Like some albino gorilla.”

 

Kevin smirked at him without missing a beat. “It’s your fault, baby. Walking around with that ass…”

 

If said ass wasn’t smarting so damn hard, Neil might have preened. As it was, it was fun watching Kevin try to bring himself to completion, all while pretending he didn’t give a single fuck about how ridiculously hot he found the whole thing—there was definitely something wrong with him if he found this entire crass affair arousing.

 

“You know, erections can be wasted,” he told Kevin with an arch of an eyebrow. “You will get another one.”

 

“But I like this one,” Kevin said, not slowing down.

 

“I thought all Englishmen were sexually repressed.”

 

“You’re talking about the Welsh,” Kevin said. “So you’re just going to watch me then?”

 

The eyebrow inched closer to his hairline. “I literally can’t look away.”

 

“You’re not going to ruin this for me,” Kevin told him.

 

“Okay.”

 

“It doesn’t bother me one bit.”

 

“Good,” Neil nodded.

 

“This is gonna happen,” Kevin declared.

 

“Glad to hear it.”

 

He watched and waited a few beats longer. Kevin stared at him with an expression that was increasingly getting flustered. Or bewildered that he wasn’t getting anywhere. Neil continued to stare, feigning disinterest.

 

“...Damn it!” Kevin yelled, snatching his hand away from under the sheets.

 

Neil crowed. “Hah! I win!” He rummaged around the foot of the bed for his pants. “Anyway, I have to go and do real work that doesn’t involve bending over. My ass hurts so hard I think I’m going to get hemorrhoids.”

 

“God, never tell me that again,” Kevin complained. “We wouldn’t have this problem if you’d been a girl.”

 

Neil scowled at him. Really? This, after keeping him on his back for five hours all afternoon? “Can you tell me how exactly we wouldn’t have this problem with me being sore if I were a girl?”

 

“Alternative holes to fill?” Kevin offered, blinking.

 

Neil rolled his eyes and grabbed his bag and shoes. “Oh my god. Never mind. I’ll see you in a couple of days when you’ve a finer appreciation of the ass you’ve been boning.”

 

* * *

 

Jean was watching a movie when Kevin emerged from his room later that night. Neil had already left and hadn’t come back after the cryptic remark about being tired so Kevin hurried to the couch for the free pizza and beer on the coffee table, and was delighted when the movie’s opening credits started.

 

“Ferris Bueller! I haven’t seen this in a while.” He cracked open a can while Jean stuffed his face with pizza. His roommate looked good, somewhat normal, so maybe the meeting he had with the VA yielded some good drugs that helped him with the psychotic breakdowns that had been plaguing him all week. “What channel is it on.”

 

“It’s not on TV,” Jean said when he was no longer choking on olive and anchovies. “I rented it.”

 

“You rented it? Are you a time cop sent back in time to kill me? You rented a DVD… I literally don’t know where one can do that anymore.”

 

Jean shrugged, washing his pizza down with liquor. “I noticed it was playing at the revival house and I realized I hadn’t seen it in a while, but I didn’t want to take the chance after the last Pirates of the Caribbean induced a psychotic break.”

 

Kevin, of course, wasn’t listening to him blathering about pointless shit that had nothing to do with him. “This movie has one of the greatest villains of all time.”

 

“Yeah,” Jean agreed. “Principal Rooney was such an ass.”

 

Kevin blinked and sat up from where he was on his way to a lazy slouch. “Rooney? He’s not the villain.”

 

“Oh, then the sister… the girl from—what was that movie? Wind?”

 

Kevin goggled at him. “Jennifer Grey? From Dirty Dancing? Wait, she’s not the villain either. Anyway ,first of all, what planet are you from that the film you retain from Jennifer Grey’s career is Wind? Cameron is obviously the villain.”

 

Jean scowled, a rare expression on his blank, usually dope-smooth face. “Cameron’s not the villain. Cameron’s the sidekick.”

 

“Jean, I think I know a little bit more about Campbellian storytelling than you,” Kevin said patronizingly. “Ferris is obviously the archetypal hero. Jennifer Grey is the foil. Principal Rooney is the fool, Sloane is the sidekick, and Cameron is the villain.”

 

“Wait, but how is Cameron the villain?”

 

Kevin looked at Jean as if he were stupid (all things considered, Kevin thought, he probably was) before launching into explanation because the sound of his own voice was music to his ears. “Ferris just wants to show Cameron a fun day, right. But Cameron acts like a whiny knob the whole time, subverting every attempt at fun with his passive-aggressive anxiety, his relentless naysaying, essentially ruining what might be Ferris’ last day of freedom by being a miserable, agoraphobic, cockblocking enemy of fun.”

 

“Cameron’s sick,” Jean said. “He doesn’t even want to go out. But Ferris guilts him into stealing his father’s luxury automobile.”

 

“Are we even watching the same movie?” Kevin grumbled.

 

A few scenes on the TV went by before Jean blinked. “I think so.” They watched a while longer before Jean said, “So Neil left. Are you seeing him again tonight?”

 

“No,” Kevin replied, eyes glued to the screen.  
  
“Tomorrow night?”

 

“No.”

 

Jean shrugged. “Oh well. He lasted longer than most of them.”

 

Kevin sighed and went for the pizza. It seemed Jean was determined to annoy him about this. “No, he’s not done. He said he’s just tired and that I wasn’t appreciating him enough. What does that even mean?”

 

Jean nodded, popping an olive into his mouth. “Well, you gotta admit, it’s nice that Neil’s so cool about how you are.”

 

“I’m sorry? How I am?”

 

“Yeah,” Jean said. “Girls always want something from a guy, and it’s nice that this is all Neil wants.”

 

“I don’t know what Neil wants,” Kevin said, making a face.

 

“Well have you asked him?”

 

“I’m trying to watch a movie,” he replied, annoyed at Jean’s insistence. “What do you even mean, ‘what he wants’? This is my brand new—” he gestured for air quotes, “—’relationship’ that I’m experiencing through _me_. So it’s not for me to worry about what Neil wants.”

 

Jean calmly drank his beer. “Or you know. You could.”

 

Kevin stared at him in stupefied silence before getting up. “You are such a Cameron!”

 

* * *

 

Neil popped the tiny dollop of frozen yogurt into his mouth with a squeeze of the little tasting cup and scrunched his face up in feigned indecision, before turning to the man behind the counter and rattling off another absurd combination of caramel syrup and nuts to taste. Beside him, Jeremy was covered from neck to toe like a choir boy and doing the same, completely ignoring the presence of his small, mousy-looking rainbow-haired wife, Renee, who was standing awkwardly at the checkout counter, trying (but mostly failing) to appear casual. At random times of the day, whenever Neil saw her, he was besieged by a complex mix of emotions, a jumble of desires to either spare her from a misery of an unhappy lifetime spent with Jeremy, the gay skank, and a wicked impulse to watch the two of them burn in hell together for pretending to be normal, when clearly, Jeremy was miles out of her league, and it was doubly obvious that he was just using Renee when she looked so awful and plain in her white Sunday’s best sundress next to his colorful dress shirt and cartoon-printed tie. The sight of the two of them together made Neil’s skin crawl with the awful certainty that someday, in some awful dystopian far off future, eventually, he was going to have to fix the error of his wanton ways and settle down and become a boring suburban homeowner with a 9-5 job, just like them.

 

Presently, he and Jeremy were once again talking about Kevin and how Jeremy found the weeklong fling thoroughly, illicitly, excitingly detestable.

 

“Three times in one afternoon!” Jeremy exclaimed as they finished the next sampler they were given and demanded another set of flavors. “Ew, do you think he boned my sister that much?”

 

Neil grimaced. “Can you imagine how pinched Allison’s face must get while they fuck?” He mimicked a sour expression Allison usually adopted when doing just about anything, from petting cute dogs on the street (or maybe shooing them away from her Louboutins) to filling out forms for Seth’s operating table insurance. The man behind the counter stared at him and Jeremy uncomfortably as he handed them another set of samples.

 

“God, that’s my sister, I’m gonna vomit!” Jeremy laughed, popping his used cup into the trash. “Three times!” He stared after Renee wistfully, who looked back at him with an awkward smile, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ears. “Why don’t we ever bone three times in a day?”

 

Renee blinked at him, still smiling. Neil thought he was going to be sick. The thought of a gay man having heterosexual intercourse could turn his stomach rather easily.

 

Jeremy rolled his eyes and turned back to Neil. “Where has he taken you?”

 

Neil shrugged, picking out another flavor. His teeth were starting to hurt. “We don’t go anywhere; we’re just having fun.”

 

“Be careful, Neil,” Jeremy said seriously. “Kevin is a soul vampire. And face it: you don’t always make the best of choices.”

 

Neil snorted. “You’re into Renee.” Jeremy squawked and Neil side-eyed Renee. “Kidding, Renee.”

 

She smiled some more at him before burying her face into her phone. Neil scoffed. God, what a weirdo.

 

The man at the yogurt shop smiled at the two of them. “So, what flavor can I get you, gentlemen?”

 

“Nothing for me, I’m too full,” Neil said, tossing his last sample cup . Jeremy agreed. “I gotta go to work. Stop worrying about me.”

 

Jeremy hugged him tightly. “Never. As long as Kevin’s in this world.”

 

Later once Neil had left, Renee turned to Jeremy seriously, fingering his tie and smoothing it around his collar, where a part of the fabric had popped up.

 

“I noticed you’re kind of mean to me whenever Neil is around,” Renee said quietly.

 

Jeremy waved her concern away airily, fluffing the rainbow-tipped ends of her silver hair. “How can you say that? Neil is lonely and we’re so happy. I don’t want to rub it in.”

 

Renee smiled. She had a chipped molar in the upper left side of her teeth and it gave her an air of charming harmless innocence. Quite like a teddy bear. Jeremy hadn’t had a teddy bear that wasn’t frozen stiff in dried jizz since he was thirteen.

 

She leaned up to her toes and kissed him chastely, lip gloss smearing on her thin pale lips. “I love you.”

 

Jeremy smiled back. “I’m so lucky.”

 

He watched Renee walk away, back to her car, so she could get herself to work. His own car was parked behind the froyo shop and the thought of him ever having to drop her off her staid office tower one day in the future like a normal couple filled him with the sort of terror one always felt when one was experiencing his life flashing before his eyes.

 

His smile faded and he fingered the keys to the Audi in his pocket. Now that Neil was at work, there wasn’t much of anything for Jeremy to do.

 

* * *

 

That afternoon, Kevin enlisted his neighbor’s help to scout the local bookstore to check out how his books were doing. The last time he’d been here, the shop clerk had thrown him out after a heated argument when the clerk had pointed out how pedantic his book was and that no one was ever going to read it because Kevin was a hack and had the imagination of a sanded out hermit crab shell after a sea storm. Kevin had called her an uneducated toenail and he’d had his ass handed to him by a woman. Wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, but he was certain artistry of his caliber was rarely appreciated in the lifetime of a writer like him.

 

Matt Boyd gave a cursory check of the bookstore, found that the mean, undersexed female clerk was out of sight, and waved him in.

 

He found an oblivious, wavy-haired college kid manning the cashier and casually pretended to browse the shelves, muttering the odd comment about some of the stuff he’d actually read. There was a cat hanging around the bookshelves. Kevin knew about the cursed animal because he’d once seen it using his book as a scratching board. That had led to the argument with the clerk from the last time. Apparently, that stupid animal belonged to her.

 

When he decided the coast was clear, he hurried to one of the back shelves, found a few copies of his book and knocked off one of the bookstore’s staff picks from the centerpiece table and replaced it with his. He’d even prepared a little label marked “Top pick!” along with his name and a short blurb to stand in front of the books.

 

He was admiring his handiwork when the sound of a voice he’d been dreading interrupted the flavor of minor victory.

 

“Nice try, dick hole.” Kevin turned and found himself face to face with the overly botoxed cheeks of Lydia Shetfield, the snooty clerk and owner of the bookstore. “How dare you take advantage of my new dumbass clerk.” She nodded to the college kid on the counter. “No offense, Philippe.”

 

Kevin scowled at her distastefully. “You know, it is disgraceful that my bookstore won’t support new writers, especially a local one, of some acclaim.”

 

“Really? Where?” Lydia arched an overly plucked eyebrow. “I haven’t seen you in a while. You got some new sleaze you’ve bamboozled into letting you throw you pasty junk into?” When Kevin couldn’t immediately think of a worthy comeback, she sneered at him. “What’s wrong, then? Humpback? Scientologist? She got a twin she absorbed into her own fetus?”

 

Kevin scoffed. “Nothing! He’s not a sleaze. We get together and have fun; it’s perfect.”

 

“Ohh,” she said, nodding. “So you finally figured out you’re gay.”

 

“I’m not gay! We are two consenting adults. He comes over. We have fun. You must’ve come across that kind of happiness sometime in your life… in a book.”

 

“Wow, I knew you were a dipshit. I was just heretofore unaware of the true depths of your dipshittery. Look, take it from a woman—”

 

Kevin pretended to look around. “Oh really? Where? Look, I know how people date, but we both agree we don’t want anything, okay. ‘Cause we’re different.”

 

She smiled disparagingly. “Oh, okay. Keep telling yourself that and see how long he sticks around.” She snapped her fingers to the cashier. “Philippe, next time you see this guy, you throw him out. And put his books back on the loser shelves.”

 

Kevin waved his hands dismissively. He had no idea why he was even justifying whatever it was he had with Josten to this woman. “Okay. Whatever. Bye.” And because he couldn’t help getting the last word, he quipped over his shoulder, “Oh and good luck finding another job in six months when this place is Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.”

 

He swept out of the store, ignoring whatever garbage that woman who obviously had it out against him, told the cashier. God, some people!

 

* * *

 

Neil was working overtime that night. Specifically, he was working on damage control after one of his clients other than the Monsters, a sixteen year old rising starlet trying to be edgy and mature after Nickelodeon dropped her now that she was ageing out of their target audience, had tweeted a photo of her own vagina. The very idea that kids still watching Spongebob Squarepants reruns, running around with snot in their noses and milk moustaches on their lips would be interested in a filtered, decked-out-with-disgusting-cartoon-ribbons photo of this girl’s cooch nauseated him, but he had a job to do and magazines to call to disclaim the photo’s existence (along with bleaching anyone and everyone’s brain including his own of the child pornography.)

 

He’d just fired off a request to the company’s PR writers for a blurb to go to TMZ when Jean found him in the solitary glass cage of his office.

 

Neil blinked as the man waved hazily at him, a request to be able to come in, and was at once filled with a mixture of embarrassment for stealing his underpants (Neil had a sizeable collection in the bottom of his dryer after he’d left Kevin’s house in mostly Jean’s undergarments under the stink of yesterday’s come-spattered clothes. He really ought to return them sometimes, maybe with flowers to go along as some sort of apology, unless Jean had taken to wearing Neil’s boxer brief booty pants once he ran out of his own clean underwear, which always seemed to disappear in Kevin’s washer. Then they’d be even) and a sort of fond annoyance at his unshaven five o’clock shadow.

 

Jean was pretty good-looking for a drug addict. It was too bad Neil drew the line at heroin for all the illegal substances his partners engaged in (because Neil always did whatever his dates were doing). And anyway, he always had two rules when sleeping with a straight man: one, never suggest that they might be anything other than straight (hell, that had to be the case even when a straight was balls deep up his ass or had his nose plastered on his pubic hair because they thought they could summon a leprechaun with red pubes. They liked to think of themselves as “experimenting”) and two, never sleep with their homies. The territorial pissing contests wasn’t good for the skin.

 

Jean, even though Kevin insisted he was in Kevin’s life firmly against Kevin’s will, definitely fell in the “homie” category, so he was off limits to seduction to Neil’s metaphorical dark side, even though he was decidedly a hot piece of ass that Neil definitely would’ve boned if he wasn’t possessed of a conscience. (All that bulk and muscle from continuing his exercise regimen even years after his deployment definitely fell into the category of beefy yum, and sadly, Neil could never have it if he wanted to keep gracing Kevin’s bed with his gorgeous presence, so maybe keeping the same piece of clothing that held his junk was the next best thing.)

 

He waved Jean in, smiling his best come-hither smile as Jean ambled inside with his hands in his jeans pockets. No one said anything against flirting with his… fling’s roommate. Anyway, what Kevin didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him.

 

“Hey, Jean, what’s up?”

 

Jean’s eyes darted to the arrangement of glasses and the twin bottles of Blue Label Neil kept on a side table to get him through the late night overtime, before looking back at him. “Kevin said he wanted to see you later.”

 

Neil cocked a curious eyebrow. “Oh really? I thought he might’ve liked a girl’s company better. You know, since they have one more hole to fill than I do.”

 

Jean’s eyes widened and he shifted uncomfortably. “Uh, yeah.”

 

Neil shrugged. “Okay, I’ll be at your place when I’m done here.”

 

“Oh, no. He said to meet you at the restaurant. I’ll text you the address.”

 

Neil couldn’t help the incredulous laugh that escaped him. Was Kevin trying to ask him out on a date? Like an actual date where other people might see that he was out and about with another man?

 

“Okay… so why didn’t he come ask me this himself? Or, you know, call me like he usually does when he wants sex?”

 

“He’s been swamped with work. You know how it is.”

 

Neil let out another disbelieving giggle. “What work? All he does is park his ass in front of a computer and dictate words to a typing app.”

 

Jean shifted again. “Uh, I should probably get going. Kevin took Matt to the bookstore with him and came back without. I still have to look for him.”

 

Neil rolled his eyes and waved him away, thinking, as he picked up the phone to dial People magazine. So Kevin wanted to actually be seen with him? Maybe this was going to get interesting. If he stood him up, it would be awesome petty revenge for insinuating he wasn’t good enough to fuck just because he didn’t have a vagina.

 

* * *

 

Neil was already at the fancy Sunset Strip restaurant by the time Kevin got there. He’d actually bothered to dress nicely because Jean said he should look good when he was apologizing; it was just good manners. So he busied himself with getting them drinks while they stood around with a gaggle of other patrons in a waiting lounge, waiting for their reservation to be called. He smiled at Neil tentatively. Neil looked distinctly uneasy to be surrounded by the LA hoity-toity as he handed him a drink.

 

“I wasn’t sure what you wanted so I got you one of their mixology drinks.”

 

Neil eyed the glasses in his hands. “What’s the other one?”

 

“Whiskey soda.” Neil grabbed that and proceeded to empty the glass in a few short gulps. Okay. This was going well.

 

They stood around awkwardly, not quite meeting each other’s eye, not really knowing what to talk about in polite company since it was the first time they were together outside the confines of Kevin’s apartment. Kevin shifted awkwardly, sipping the overly sweet concoction left in his hands. A date in this posh restaurant was bound to be a disaster, not for the least reason that he just didn’t do these kinds of fancy shit places. They reminded him a bit too much of Allison, with all the posturing and pretending to have way more money to spend than they actually did.

 

Neil stared mournfully at his empty glass and caught Kevin’s eye. They’d been waiting over ten minutes now. With a reservation, this was just ridiculous.

 

“Should we just go? This is kind of taking a long time. I know you don’t like to wait.”

 

“No, no, it’s fine,” Kevin started to say. Damn it. They were so doing this, if only so Neil wouldn’t be mad and they could go back to that happy cocoon of sex and nothing else that Kevin absolutely loved.

 

But just then, the hostess arrived to show them to their seats. Kevin tried not to be tense as he let Neil through first. He never knew how to act in these things, and to be fair, he had no idea how to treat another man while on a date, because he just didn’t date other men.

 

He stopped short when they were shown to a large long table occupied by three other couples already starting with their meals and he turned on the hostess. “I’m sorry, what the hell is this?”

 

“This is our communal table,” the hostess said imperturbably setting down their menus.

 

“‘Communal table’?” Kevin parroted, flabbergasted. “If we wanted to dine with total strangers, we would’ve taken an ad out on Craigslist. Or, you know, invited our parents over.” He looked back at Neil, but Neil was already getting on the high stool.

 

“You’re not dining with them, you’re dining at the same table as them,” said the hostess.

 

Kevin rolled his eyes. “Really cutting it with the semantic Ginsu knife there, aren’t you?” The hostess simply smiled, so Kevin joined Neil across the table and stared down at the menu, eyes widening at the prices on the fancy food list. “Forty two dollars for a pellizzoni? What the hell is a pellizzoni?”

 

“It’s a type of pasta,” Neil answered, almost automatically.

 

“What’s it made of? Bald eagle foreskin?” Neil stared back at him with wide eyes. “I couldn’t think of anything soft and expensive.”

 

The man sitting beside him pulled up short and turned to Kevin. “Bald eagles don’t have penises. They have a cloaca.”

 

Kevin blinked at him. “Thank you.” He turned back to Neil. “Are people allowed to talk to you at these places?”

 

Neil looked at him incredulously. “Seriously, we can just go.”

 

“No, we’re doing this,” Kevin insisted.

 

“Fine,” Neil conceded. “And don’t worry, I won’t order the pellizzoni.”

 

“No, order whatever you like. Maybe you should ask fo a cushion on your seat too. These stools can’t be all that comfortable.”

 

Neil scowled at him. “I knew it! I knew I shouldn’t have complained about—” He cut off as another couple joined the table next to them. “...about the way my ass hurts after yesterday!” he hissed in a lower tone of voice. “You’re so weird about it, telling me that it would’ve been better if I was a girl!”

 

“How is it weird?” Kevin demanded. “Obviously, if you had another hole to fill, your butt wouldn’t hurt half as much? What? Did I say something wrong?”

 

"Oh my god! You’re such an asshole. There are _other_ things—!”

 

Kevin frowned, not getting the thread of the conversation. “Do you mean your mouth?”

 

Neil suddenly froze, eyes widening. Kevin followed his gaze in time to see the hostess showing Seth and Allison in from the waiting area. He turned back to ask Neil if they wanted to scarper out but Neil was already gone, and Seth and Allison were already upon him.

 

“Hey, Kevin!” Seth called.

 

Kevin’s eyes widened and he tried for surprise. “Hey! What the hell are you—I’m surprised you’re not on your honeymoon.”

 

“We go in a month,” Allison said smugly, planting a hand over Seth’s arm. “It’s a busy time for Seth.”

 

“Old bags all want to get their hips replaced at the same time,” Seth explained good-naturedly. “It’s always the same: if one of them can walk normal, all of them want to walk normal.”

 

Allison craned her neck over Kevin’s head, ostensibly to check out his food. “You’re dining alone?”

 

“Uhh,” Kevin said eloquently, glancing back at Neil’s empty seat. “No, I was with someone but he’s not feeling well.”

 

“He,” Allison repeated, smirking. “So you finally realized you’re gay?”

 

“Oh my god, why do people feel the need to make all of these unnecessary comments about my sexuality?” Kevin exploded. “Also, for the record, gay and bisexual are totally different things!”

 

“Hoho, ditched by a boy at the commune tabes!” Seth crowed. “That’s rough, buddy.”

 

“Well,” Allison said, smiling nastily, “we’re not together anymore, so I won’t bother you with whoever you want to sleep with.”

 

“Thank you,” Kevin muttered.

 

“Enjoy your solitary dinner.” She turned to Seth. “Honey?”

 

Seth gestured at her to move along. “I’ll be right there.” He turned to Kevin seriously. “So, I wanted to apologize for the ruckus at the wedding. Tensions were high on account of Allison’s mother being a total cooze.”

 

“Well, you’re throwing your life away, so you were stressed out. I understand.”

 

“Okay, well, I should get back to Alli before the amuse-booze drops. She’s been known to take down hers and my booze if I’m not quick enough.”

 

Kevin nodded his understanding. If he was an alcoholic, one could literally set fire to Allison’s liver with little to no kindling. He turned back to the table but it seemed Neil was gone. Permanently. There was probably no point in sticking around.

 

He found Neil hanging around in an alley next to a dumpster a few minutes later, waving around a canister of potato crisps and a bottle of Red Label, trying to catch his attention. Kevin scowled and stalked over.

 

“They didn’t see me, did they?” Neil asked anxiously, swigging the whiskey straight from the bottle.

 

“No.”

 

“Whew,” Neil said, sagging in infinite relief. “That was close!”

 

“I thought you were mad at me,” Kevin said.

 

“No. Well, I am but not compared to what a disaster it would have been if Allison and Seth had seen us together.”

 

“Oh,” Kevin said, annoyed. “Right, then I’m mad at you because you just ditched me at the ‘commune tabes’.”

 

Neil made a face. “Are you seriously ready to explain this… whatever _this_ is... to anyone? Because I’m not. And I would’ve almost had to if you hadn’t taken me out on this ludicrous date.”

 

“Well, I thought I should! You were so mad after the… gay… thing.”

 

“Well, yes,” Neil exclaimed. “I didn’t want you to automatically dismiss me as goddamn viable human being to share air with just because I’m gay. But I’m not like mad mad. I knew what I was getting into with you, Kevin.”

 

“Okay,” Kevin said. “Then good. I’m glad you hated that place too. It’s the worst, right?”

 

Neil laughed. “No, dude. I’ve been here before. It’s awesome. I love this fancy shit, just, you know, not with you.”

 

“Ouch.”

 

“I mean,” Neil hastened to add, “not _yet_. Or whatever. I told you upfront: I’m scared of this shit.”

 

“Right,” Kevin said placatingly. “And I don’t believe it in it, so.” Neil offered him the Red Label and he drank a long drought in an effort to restore his sanity. “I’m still hungry, though. Are you?”

 

Neil stuffed potato chips into his face. “I could eat.”

  


Twenty minutes later, the crackle of Chinese takeout paper bags filled the revival house theater as Kevin fished out two cartons of to-go chow mein and handed one to Neil, who settled noisily into his seat, leaning back and unpacking the noodles happily, Kevin’s jacket around his bare shoulders because of course his idea for date-appropriate clothing was a black shoulder-baring tank top and it was cold in the theater.

 

“This is a great idea,” he told Kevin as Kevin handed out the forks. “God, I love this movie.”

 

“It’s the best,” Kevin agreed.

 

“Ugh, I hate Cameron so much.”

 

“He’s repulsive.”

 

Neil nodded, starting to stuff his face again with noodles this time. “No kidding. It’s like, kill yourself already.”

 

Kevin turned and watched his profile, not quite understanding what it was among Neil’s inane comments about a movie he’d already seen over a hundred times in his teen years and again just a few days ago with Jean, that cut a strange path of warmth running from the back of his neck to his stomach, making him smile absently.

 

Neil turned to him, noodles dangling out of the corner of his mouth. “What?”

 

Kevin shook his head and smiled again to himself. “Nothing.”

 

“Did we get chopsticks?” Neil asked, climbing over his lap to get to the takeout paper bag. “Oh, beer!”

 

“Sshh!” a few movie goers complained.

 

Kevin and Neil, as one, turned to them and yelled at them to shut up. In the end, the few people that dotted the mostly empty theater left, muttering to themselves about noisy assholes in movie houses. Kevin sat back, unperturbed, as he and Neil enjoyed their dinner and canned beer and movie, Neil leaning against his shoulder as they watched.

 

The date wasn’t quite such a disaster after all.

 

* * *

 

“Good morning!” Neil said brightly, just as the tinkling door chimes of the bookstore stopped ringing.

 

The woman at the counter, a pale-faced office-working sort in a padded blazer (hello, it’s 2017, who even wore shoulder pads these days?!) smiled at him in greeting.

 

“I’m in a literary club at the USC, and we’ll be reading a book this weekend, to go with the poetry jam.” The lie rolled off his lips expertly. So he wasn’t getting rusty after all, and the t-shirt and slouchy jeans completed the starving-artist-in-college chic pretty well. “I just wanted to know if you have enough copies?”

 

“Fantastic,” the bookstore clerk said. “What’s the title?”

 

Neil pretended to scrunch his face up, as if trying to remember something he couldn’t be bothered to. “ _Congratulations, You’re Dying_? By some guy with the most banal white boy name.” The woman stared down at him from her high counter with frost-laden eyes. “Why aren’t you typing?”

 

“So you’re the sleaze,” she hissed, judging his single-bored-white-boy-from-the-burbs getup with the evil eye.

 

Neil scowled at her, shrugging Kevin’s giant plaid shirt higher up his thin shoulders, and flicking an auburn curl from where it flopped over his eyes. He had an idea.

 

“Why? You jealous?”

 

Ten minutes later, he emerged from the bookstore and flounced into Kevin’s passenger seat, whining.

 

“God, what a bitch! But she’s totally into you.” He grinned saucily at Kevin’s horrified expression. “Want me to wingman for you? You could really cozy it up with her shoulder pads.”

 

Kevin looked almost green. “Hard pass, thank you. I think I rather appreciate your wanker more.” Neil’s smile positively glowed and Kevin rolled his eyes. “She didn’t buy your college kid thing?”

 

“No, I swear people like that have absolutely no place in customer service. So I stole—” he opened his messenger bag with a flourish and the bookstore’s fat orange tabby cat popped out with a loud, demanding mewl, “—this instead.”

 

Kevin laughed as he pulled off the curb. “Just keep that thing away from my books. It has it out against me.”

 

Neil pouted as he petted the cat fondly. “You’re offending Sir Fat Cat McCatterson!”

 

“That has to be the stupidest name in the annals of feline domestication,” Kevin declared, kissing Neil in the lips as they rolled up to a stoplight.

 

Neil’s smile couldn’t get any wider. He had a cat, he had a boy—one who had no problem admitting he was bisexual and was willing to be seen out with him (okay, maybe just a tiny problem about the bisexual part), and it was going to be an awesome day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Renee is Jeremy's wife. When I was plotting this after watching S1-4 of the show, I realized, I couldn't have picked a better setup when I got to the S4 finale. >:)
> 
> This chapter basically just expounds more on Kevin being a complete narcissist, Neil being a doormat pushover (really, it's because he has extremely low self-esteem and he deals with it by sleeping with anything on two legs) and Jean being an absolute darling. Yes, their relationships are abnormal and unhealthy (hello, Neil wanted to fuck Jean in that office scene). That's what this story is about. Also, what did I say about this fic being unreasonably AU?
> 
> Come yell at me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mumuinc) about my fics.


	4. Exclusivity only applies to private schools and country clubs. (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil asks for a key to Kevin's house. Kevin, predictably, freaks the fuck out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out I lied: this chapter does have _feelings_ and a bunch of sad stuff.
> 
> I got to write another chapter after a fender bender in the morning had me too rattled to work, my boss gave me the day off, so you get one more chapter this week. Oh wow, look, now we get sorta-romance!
> 
> All the funny dialogue come from S1EP3 of _You're the Worst_. The unfunny parts are mine.

Kevin walked into his en suite bathroom after waking from a rather horrific dream in which Neil was a runaway college coed that the mafia was after, and he was a scared, alcoholic sports superstar who couldn’t walk into a public toilet without a bodyguard. It wasn’t really the gruesome details of the vivid scenes of nightmarish torture that went on in the dream that turned his stomach, but the fact that he actually had anything to do with any manner of sport. Decidedly, Kevin had left any real horror of playing something so pedestrian and sweaty like a sport soon after he left Britain, even though his brother and uncle constantly mailed him reminders of a childhood he would rather forget, up until he moved into this house. At least this time, they didn’t have his address anymore.

 

Neil stood in the middle of his bathroom, stark naked (Kevin had eventually had to make peace with the fact that he was boning a person in possession of a penis somewhere between the second and third week he’d woken up in front of his house, hungover beyond the seven levels of hell with his face in Neil’s crotch and his eyes level with the sole evidence that he wasn’t fucking some flat-chested, androgynous college girl who wore briefs instead of lacy t-backs. Jean frequently saved them from indecent exposure complaints from their boring, suburban neighbors with a blanket to cover up all the hanging bits before they did their walk of shame back into the safety of Kevin’s house. Neil was ecstatic with the admission and he spent every possible waking moment in the privacy of Kevin’s room parading his red pubes that Kevin eventually became inured to the sight of another person’s junk—though he did also almost throw Jean out of the house that one time Jean was too doped on Ambien and had basically done the same thing. Moral of the story: Neil’s dick was okay though Kevin would probably never get to a point in his life where he wouldn’t puke a little inside his mouth whenever he had to touch it; everyone else better kept theirs hidden or he was going to smash beer bottles into their balls, so maybe it was just as well that Jean bought jock straps to protect his junk from Kevin’s rage.)

 

Kevin only had a moment of relatively normal peace before Neil sprayed shaving cream on his armpits and attempted to use Kevin’s straight razor to plow through the nonexistent hair under his wings.

 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

 

“Oh,” Neil said, putting the razor away, to Kevin’s immense relief, before his bathroom became a scene of unimaginable gore, like a still from a Saw movie. “I’ve already had most of the hairs lasered off when I was a teenager but there’s this one strand that just keeps growing back and my waxing salon won’t take my reservations anymore. They said I scream like a kidnapped four-year-old every time I get my butthole waxed.”

 

“I’m sorry, you get your what now waxed? And why would you get your armpit hair lasered off? That’s disturbing!”

 

Neil shrugged as he washed off the remainder of the shaving cream. “I wanted to star in my own amateur porn when I was fifteen, before I discovered my parents could have been busted for child pornography once the FBI traced our IP address. That was a missed opportunity, come to think of it.” He grinned at Kevin as he reached for the razor again. Kevin slapped his hand away. “Relax, I’m just gonna shave my legs! There’s far too much hair there for laser so now I just use whatever means necessary.”

 

“Oh my god, I use that thing on my face! This is why there are disposable razors in the cabinet. You’re disgusting, Josten.” He reached over the counter and passed one of the throwaway razors Jean normally stole from convenience stores whenever he was high, pausing to admire the slim pale line of creamy skin as Neil ran the razor up one fine leg. From the angle he was looking, his dick was almost hidden by the towel he’d draped over his lap to wipe any excess shaving cream.

 

Neil glanced up as he stripped off his boxers and sat on the toilet, a nervous laugh bubbling out of his mouth. “Uh, could you wait for me to get clear before you drop the stink bombs?”

 

Kevin stood and tugged off his shorts completely before stepping into the tub. “Oh no, that’s just pee.”

 

“You pee sitting down?” Neil asked incredulously as Kevin drew the shower curtain closed and sat at the edge of the tub to get through his shower.

 

“Well, yes. I love sitting. Sitting is one of my top five favorite activities.”

 

“Oh,” Neil said and Kevin sort of wished he wasn’t behind the curtain so he could see his face. There was definitely something buried under there, under the faux casual air he normally affected. “Really? What are the others?”

 

Kevin thought about it. “Eating things. Shutting down stupid people verbally. Bubble baths. Masturbating.”

 

“Where’s sex in all that?”

 

“Maybe eight. Sex with you would be sixth, unless I have a flying dream. Then sex with you would be seventh.”

 

“Charming,” Neil said. There was a minor commotion before the shower curtain was tugged aside. “So since sex with me is like, not even in top five, if I bend over now, would you eat out my ass?” He wiggled his eyebrows and the look would have been sexy if the activity he was suggesting didn’t make Kevin want to stuff soap into his ears until he’d bleached his brain of the mental image.

 

“You know, sometimes, I think you’re just suggesting all of these sexually deviant activities to see if you can get a rise out of me,” Kevin muttered, reaching to tug the shower curtain back.

 

Neil smirked at him, glancing suggestively down at his half-hard cock that had stirred to life at the merest suggestion of sex, even sexually deviant sex that Kevin wasn’t personally invested in. “I think _some_ part of you wants to. Don’t worry. I could get a coffee enema before you eat me. I heard mocha-flavored buttholes make for the best experience.”

 

“You’re a disgusting human being,” he replied, arousal shriveling at the idea and killing his desire for morning coffee.

 

Neil gave him one last suggestive smile before letting him tug the curtain back into place to resume his shower, and went back, presumably, to shave some other hairless unmentionable part of his body. Kevin appreciated that Neil kept up with the charade of him fucking some sort of hairless gazelle, although by now, he didn’t quite mind the roughness of pubic hair on his face. He hadn’t gotten to the point where he could actually put his mouth on Neil’s dick yet, but there were baby steps to take in accepting this entire gay agenda foisted down his throat (so to speak) by his desire to fuck that adorably fuzz-free little asshole and getting his teeth tangled into Neil’s magical red bush wasn’t a bad starter, come to think of it. Maybe there was merit in learning how to rim.

 

“Hey,” Neil said presently, interrupting Kevin’s fantasy of shoving his tongue up that hot, tight puckered hole, “what’s your schedule like today? I’ve still got clothes in your dryer and I need to get to some of them for a work thing I’ve got.”

 

Kevin imagined shoving a finger up to go along with his tongue… maybe they could start up with sex toys… That usually got Neil going and begging for it. “...What? Oh, no. I’ve got an entire day dealing with immensely stupid people. I’ll probably be home late.”

 

“Okay, you think can give me a key so I could let myself in to get my shit?”

 

Kevin froze, Neil’s words effectively killing whatever fantasy he retained about rimming and sex toys and having Neil sit on his face for maybe hours on end so he could exercise the sharpest, deadliest part of his body.

 

“What?”

 

The shower curtain swept aside again and Neil’s face was directly in front of his unaroused dick. “I just meant that you could lend me a key, so I didn’t have to wait around for you.”

 

He scowled and grabbed his towel. This conversation was way too early in the day, hell, it was way too early in the month-long span of whatever casual thing they had between them for keys to even be changing hands. Christ, he dated Allison for months before he even let her borrow his car, and now Neil was just asking for a key to _his house_ because it was convenient?

 

“I didn’t mean it like _that_ , Kevin!” Neil protested when he didn’t say anything and proceeded to march out back into the bedroom to pull his clothes on. “I mean, it’s just a key. It’s not such a big deal for you to be shitting yourself or anything.”

 

He turned his back to Neil as he pulled up the previous day’s jeans with his boxers still in it, resolute in his conviction not to have any sort of conversation about keys or what they meant for the two of them.

 

“I mean, it’s not like I asked you to sacrifice your first born child on my altar,” Neil continued to say as he followed him out.

 

Kevin stood up and turned just as Neil did the last jump to get his pert ass into his ridiculously skinny jeans. Kevin watched for a moment, mesmerized by the jiggle of cotton-covered flesh as Neil zipped himself up. Then he shook himself out of his reverie. Now was not the time to be fantasizing as he felt the encroaching presence of another person wanting to share his living space.

 

“It’s not just a key! It’s my freedom melted down into a metal totem. It means there are rights granted, and designations designated.”

 

Neil frowned and started to deny the seriousness of his request again before stopping short. “Oh my god, you’re right.”

 

“I am?”

 

He laughed nervously, running a hand through the mess of his red curls as he grabbed his bag and shoes. “I must still be hung over. Thanks for calling me out. Momentary lapse of sanity. Jesus…”

 

Kevin sniffed, feeling vindicated. “Right. So, are we going to hang out later?”

 

Neil paused in his hurry to dump all his things into his bag. “I actually have plans. Anyway, see you later. Thanks for doing all the sex stuff on me.”

 

He didn’t stop until he’d slammed out of Kevin’s house. Kevin blink and thought it was just one more crack in the weird Easter egg that popped down his lap in Allison’s wedding. (The entirety of Neil’s existence in his life felt like a revolving door of video game Easter eggs that needed to be hunted down and exploited, just like Neil’s erogenous zones.)

 

Upstairs, Jean was setting out the coffee, which Kevin resolutely pushed away. Neil’s comment about coffee enemas still turned his stomach. Jean set their breakfast on the table with a flourish, smiling like he wasn’t actually high.

 

“I made a frittata. It’s an egg-based dish similar to an omelette—”

 

“I know what a frittata is,” Kevin whined, interrupting Jean’s good mood.

 

Jean was unfazed. “This one has leek and goat cheese. I saw the recipe on Rachael Ray.”

 

Kevin scowled at him. “You’re not supposed to watch her. Your doctor said your obsession with her is unhealthy,” he told Jean, because of course Jean told him everything his doctors said because he absolutely had no concept of privacy or doctor-patient privileged discussions.

 

“Yeah,” Jean agreed. “But every minute I’m watching her is another minute I’m not doing heroin.” He paused and shrugged. “Except sometimes, I’m also doing heroin.”

 

“D’you know he actually asked for a key?” Kevin muttered, not really caring either way about Jean’s stupid obsession with daytime TV.

 

“Who?”

 

“Rachael Ray,” Kevin deadpanned, rolling his eyes. “Who else comes into my house absolutely uninvited besides you?”

 

“Rachael Ray absolutely can have a key,” Jean said wistfully. “What’s wrong with giving Neil a key? I mean, keys just open doors.”

 

“It’s not just a key,” Kevin said, adamant. “It’s a symbol of the unceasing, inexorable march of everything towards predictability, blandness, and mediocrity. It’s the Rachael Rays of the world.”

 

Jean’s eyes were shining. “A cozy world of home-cooked meals and graceful weight fluctuation. I’d live in that world.”

 

Kevin wasn’t listening; his rant was in full swing. “I honestly cannot believe of anything more un-special and un-thought out as ‘Can I have a key?’ Ruled by nothing more uninteresting than animal instinct.” He slapped Jean’s hand away when Jean attempted to steal his frittata. “‘Can I have a key?’ How can you see this shit happening and just smile and be okay with it? How can you look at the person you’re with and not just know that there’s another person in there who’s boring and lame and will eventually ask for emotional support? How can you just ignore that shit?”

 

Jean shrugged, his hands ripping up half the frittata from Kevin’s plate so he could stuff it into his mouth before Kevin’s anger ran out of steam. “I dunno. ‘Cause you like him, I guess.”

 

Kevin stopped talking and stared at Jean’s face, willing himself to decipher whether Jean had any deeper meaning other than the banal desire for Kevin and Neil’s “relationship” to work out. When he couldn’t find anything in the drug-hazed vacant pools of gray in Jean’s eyes, he swallowed as realization sank.

 

“Yeah, well. I don’t know how to do that.”

 

Jean shoveled another large piece of egg into his mouth, not really bothered with Kevin’s dawning existential crisis. “You know, it makes sense he’d be emotional today. It’s his birthday.”

 

“It is?” Kevin said, stopping himself from taking a bite like a civilized person, unlike Jean. “Why didn’t he tell me that?”

 

“Maybe because you were too preoccupied with your stupid idea that he wants to encroach on your space and cramp the sorry, sex-deprived existence you lead without him constantly offering up his asshole like an endless supply of cake?” Jean offered, rubbing his chin. “Come to think of it, Neil’s butt does look like something you could really dig your hands into…”

 

A buzzing sound from somewhere in the kitchen interrupted Jean’s poetic monologue of one of Neil’s best redeeming qualities, saving Kevin from having to take a swing, because damn, he was absolutely tapping that ass, and Jean, as Kevin’s non-paying boarder, wasn’t allowed to dip his fingers into that delectable fondue. (Also, punching Jean probably wouldn’t end very well for Kevin’s nose. He’d once tried to knock Jean out when he was having one of his episodes and Jean had just plowed through him without so much as a second glance, resulting in the most humiliating visit to the ER to reset his nose, and him having to bail Jean out before his psychotic break got any worse.)

 

He found the offending object and held it up, realizing from the tacky gold casing that it was Neil’s phone. It beeped and buzzed a few more times, too fast in succession for Kevin to make out any of the messages that flashed through the lock screen.

 

“It’s Neil’s,” he said quietly as Jean stared curiously at the glint that entered his eye. “I better bring it to him.”

 

“Hand it over,” Jean said.

 

“I’m not gonna snoop!” Kevin protested just as Jean grabbed the phone in his hand, dropped it into a paper bag and folded and stapled the top. “You seriously think I’m not strong enough to tear through ten staples?”

 

Jean pointedly stapled the bag some more before handing it to Kevin with a beatific smile. “Have a good day at school.”

 

* * *

  


“You’re seriously going to do a juice cleanse? Now? In my favorite diner?” Neil whined as he stuffed another large piece of pancake drizzled liberally with powdered sugar and maple syrup as Jeremy vigorously shook out the tumbler of viscous purple liquid in front of him with a smug look.

 

“It’s not a juice cleanse; it’s a protein shake meal replacement. The gym instructor at Renee’s church told me it’ll clear my skin and resolve all my lingering knee problems from kneeling in front of her thighs, trying to convince myself to go down on her.”

 

Neil let out a mock gasp of horror. “Please stop talking about your wife’s cooch. I’m seriously trying to eat here.”

 

“Ugh, I know right, “Jeremy sighed, setting the tumbler down. “I literally wish I could just die, or maybe buy her a strap on so we could do things the other way around, that could work too. Anyway, there’s like ten different men who joined the church camp with us, and I don’t know if any of them are gay, but if I gained maybe a tiny bit more muscle mass, I bet I could get them to overlook Jesus’ abs and ogle mine.”

 

“Boo, you whore,” Neil pouted, tossing bits of pancake into the open collar of Jeremy’s dress shirt, which had the top three buttons undone, now that Renee was nowhere in sight.

 

“Wow,” Jeremy said, looking slightly miffed. “If it wasn’t your birthday, I’d be really hurt.”

 

Neil snorted. “Just because you haven’t taken dick up your ass since you got married doesn’t make you any less of a whore like me.” He sighed and looked down at his food. “Sorry, ugh. This whole Kevin thing just has me all messed up.”

 

“Hah,” Jeremy grinned smugly. “I warned you about him. I bet the two of you talk about me all the time.”

 

“No,” Neil said, and he even managed to say it earnestly.

 

“Ew! I bet you guys talk about me while you’re having sex!” Jeremy pointed out, completely oblivious. “You guys are weird!”

 

Neil rolled his eyes, not quite understanding why Jeremy was so convinced that Kevin even gave a rat’s ass about him when they never talked anything more substantial than dick to asshole when they were having sex. “I didn’t mean the key thing like he took it. At least, I don’t think I did. We’re having fun, that’s enough.”

 

Jeremy eyed him critically. “It better be. He’s a bad person.”

 

“Jeremy, _I_ ’m a bad person.”

 

“Ooh, are you still seeing Mr. Fancy Director guy?”

 

Neil pointedly looked back down at his pancakes. Ichirou was another topic he wished he could just magic out of his life. “That’s complicated.”

 

Jeremy heaved a sigh that seemed like it came from the depths of his Ferragamo shoes. “Your life is so fun and complicated. My life used to be fun and complicated too.”

 

“Yeah, and now you’re married to that Jesus freak who worships a dead guy in a skirt…”

 

“Hey! I’ll have you know that Jesus has some really hot abs and Renee—”

 

Whatever Jeremy had been about to say about his uninteresting female wife (who didn’t have a dick, ergo, not interesting to Neil) was lost as Neil’s assistant came running into the diner, “emergency” stamped all over her sweat-sheened forehead.

 

“Thank god you’re here, Neil! Your phone keeps ringing out to voicemail and Aaron just did an interview!”

 

Neil threw his napkin onto the table, half standing up in the booth. “He did what?! With who? Without consulting me?”

 

“Some college paper. Don’t give me that face: it’s a riot. The woman who interviewed him is writes for some feminist paper and he used the words ‘bitch’ and ‘hoe’ thirty six times. The interviewer is threatening to go to the NYT.”

 

“Shit!” Neil catapulted out of the booth just as Jeremy yelled a “Happy Birthday!” to him as he ran out of the diner. He’d pay Jeremy back for breakfast later… Not.

 

* * *

  


Kevin had been driving for the past ten minutes now, the beep and incessant buzzing of Neil’s phone, sealed in that paper bag of the ten staples Jean had stupidly thought was going to be enough to keep him from thoroughly invading Neil’s privacy, slowly driving him crazy. How could one person get so many pings and texts and missed calls, and their life just completely available for Kevin to peek into, just be so damn…

 

Shit.

 

He couldn’t take it anymore.

 

He pulled over to the curb and grabbed the paper bag, puzzling out the staples for a good long minute before he finally thought, fuck it, and ripped out the bag from the glued-together flaps on the bottom. Neil’s phone was an old model dinged up iPhone, but the lock screen still pulled up the passcode keypad when Kevin tried to unlock it. He went through a number of potential key combinations before the phone locked and wouldn’t let him try again.

 

Frustrated, he hurled the cursed piece of outdated technology back on the passenger seat.

 

Neil said he had plans for the evening and now that Kevin knew it was his birthday, he couldn’t seem to stop obsessing over what those plans might be. What if Neil was going on a date? And Kevin had just pissed him off by telling him he couldn’t have a key? What was a key anyway compared to unlimited rounds of mind-blowing sex?

 

Shit, what if Neil decided never to sleep with him again?

 

He was about to give up and just take the phone to Neil’s office  as he’d originally intended when another text came in. Kevin stared at the little preview message on the lock screen.

 

**Ichiro M: Looking forward to tonight XOXO**

 

Kevin’s eyes widened as he realized he had no idea who all these people in Neil’s life were. There had to be a hundred texts that had already come in since he’d found the phone. But more importantly….

 

“Who the hell is Ichirou?!”

 

* * *

  


Neil was still chewing out Aaron and Nicky for whatever latest round of stupid PR blunder they’d committed, probably while high, so Kevin made himself comfortable in Neil’s office by going directly for the bottle of rum on the side table. If he was going to find out whether Neil was going to go on some stupid cheesy birthday date with some _guy_ , Kevin was going to need liquid courage to confront him for it. There was also definitely that minor thing about him never telling Kevin about his birthday… Not that Kevin cared exactly. Neil could do whatever the fuck he wanted but if he was going to get all snippy and emotional, then Kevin was owed an explanation at least, right?

 

Right.

 

The Bacardi bottle still wasn’t cooperating when Neil swept into the office holding a giant bouquet of flowers that he primped and arranged as he looked around for a vase to display them in, when he recognized Kevin in his office and stopped short.

 

“What are you doing here?”

 

“Oh, uh,” Kevin said eloquently before remembering the phone in his pocket. “I brought you your phone.”

 

“Awesome, thanks.”

 

And then because he couldn’t help himself (the flowers were just incriminating!): “Oh, you got flowers. Buy them yourself?”

 

Neil’s smile was smug. “No.”

 

“Special occasion of some sort?”

 

Neil waved the suggestion away. “People send me flowers sometimes, Kevin. They want me to be happy. People like me.”

 

“Oh, I know that, of course I know that.” He looked at Neil expectantly, willing him to tell him about his birthday or about this Ichirou fellow. When he didn’t, he tried again. “So what are you doing later?”

 

Neil glanced down at his phone. “I have plans.”

 

Right. What a liar.

 

“Okay, fine. Bye.”

 

He swept past Neil and didn’t stop walking until he was out of the building, and headed straight for the smoking area, cigarette already dangling on his lips. There was a skinny blond boy hanging out next to the ash trays.

 

“Hey, can I get one of those?”

 

Kevin pulled the stick out of his mouth. “These are pretty expensive.”

 

“Don’t be an asshole,” the boy said, snatching the stick away the moment Kevin said “Fine.”

 

He stared back at the building, wondering if Neil would come running after him. Allison had and she wasn’t half the desperate chick Neil definitely was.

 

“You’re the guy boning my publicist,” the blond boy said, staring him up and down.

 

Kevin opened his mouth to deny it, then realized there was no point. Was there even anyone in LA who didn’t know he and Neil were sleeping together? Anyway, what the fuck did it matter? That little snot already had plans with some bloke named Ichirou and Kevin was totally going to burn his ass from all the other numbers in his black book.

 

“Used to be,” he said, now recognizing the blond kid as Aaron Minyard, one half of the trouble-making rap duo whose antics frequently drew Neil out of Kevin’s bed.

 

“Yeah, I googled your ass,” Aaron said, picking up his skateboard from where he’d parked it on top of the ashtray. “I liked your book.”

 

Kevin smirked, pulling off his sunglasses. Ah now, these were words that sounded like music to his ears. “Really? What did you like about it?”

 

“Well obviously, it was boring as shit, and clearly you used to jack off to Hemingway when you were in high school.” He looked Kevin over again. “But the prose was good.”

 

“Thank you,” Kevin said sharply, wildly pleased with himself despite the loss of his booty call to whomever loser it was that texted Neil. Who the fuck ended their texts with XOXO? This guy texted like a prepubescent girl with freckles and a gap tooth.

 

He started to walk past Aaron when he said, “Why’d you _used_ to be boning him?”

 

“I don’t know. We were never a… real… thing.”

 

Aaron arched a pale blond eyebrow at him. He was tinier than even Neil. Kevin wondered if early stardom stunted this kid’s growth.

 

“How come? All I know is, I don’t let nobody talk to me the way Neil does.”

 

Kevin blinked down at his yellow head. “Yeah, me neither.”

 

“Then he must be pretty dope if we both let him do that.”

 

Kevin sighed. What an asshole. He was right though. “Are you going back in?” He fished into his pocket and tugged out his house key from the key fob of his car. “Give this to him for me.”

 

He started to turn away but then remembered why he was going to burn Neil’s number in the first place. “Hey, do you know someone named Ichirou?”

 

Aaron shook his head and got on his skateboard, so Kevin walked alone back to his car.

 

* * *

  


Neil found the bleached blond pretty president of the feminist group Aaron had interviewed for in a bar, taking full advantage of happy hour. She was a tall, athletic young woman with a pretty face, the sort model scouts crawled all over if she were an ungainly thirteen-year-old with gappy teeth and wore Taylor Swift concert t-shirts. As it were, she was dressed nicely, in a silk blouse and skinny jeans and looked like the sort of valley girl that didn’t allow creepy man-boy doctors up her skirts like Allison did.

 

“Katelyn Sinclair? I want to talk to you about Aaron Minyard.”

 

She smiled pleasantly at him. “When you went into PR, were you aware that you’d become an instant cliche?”

 

“Snotty female reporter is better?” Neil sniped back, thoroughly annoyed. Just because he was gay didn’t mean he’d bend over for his clients. Okay, maybe he would, for Aaron. Wait, no, that was disgusting. Aaron was like his child.

 

“What do you want?” she asked him, still all smiles as she flipped her obnoxious blond hair back.

 

“I just wanna make sure my client’s words aren’t taken out of context.”

 

Kately smiled cheekily. “Don’t worry, I’ll provide lots of context.”

 

“He’s a moron!” Neil exclaimed. “He’s probably not even old enough to drink. His opinions aren’t fully formed.”

 

Kately leaned forward, as if taking him into her confidence. “We’re at the dawn of a revolution. You wouldn’t run around saying the n-word and yet people act like it’s perfectly normal to belittle women by calling us ‘bitch’ and ‘hoe’ like it was all we’re good for.”

 

Neil shrugged. “Aaron calls me ‘bitch’ all the time and I don’t care.”

 

Katelyn looked him over, probably silently judging his loose sweater and cropped pants. “He’s not wrong there. You got anything else?”

 

Neil pouted and grabbed the whiskey he’d ordered for himself. “No. It’s my birthday. I didn’t really prepare.” He batted his eyelashes at Katelyn. “This is usually the point where I’d normally try flirting with you, except ew.”

 

Kately let out a little miffed sound and shook her head. Neil shrugged and downed his drink.

 

“Okay, I tried.” He turned away and mimicked the head toss Katelyn had affected when he first arrived.

 

“Wait, that’s it?”

 

“Well yeah. I mean you’re probably right, and sacrificing that little midget’s career in the name of feminism is a small price to pay to get the patriarchy to advance the plight of women across continental America.” He took a few well-timed steps away from her, smiling secretly to himself and timing the beats in his head. Any moment now…

 

“I’ve heard the Foxhole had a big hush budget,” Katelyn called after him.

 

Neil swung around, craning his neck up as she towered over him in her disgusting heeled boat shoes. “I can give you two grand, that’s it.”

 

“And he has to come give me another interview.”

 

Neil shrugged. “Deal. Nice doing business with you.”

 

* * *

  


Kevin watched from his car as Neil stepped out of the cab looking dressed to kill. He’d followed him around all evening as he went to meetings, before finally dropping back to his place, presumably to shower and change for his date. Now that Kevin could see what he was wearing, there’s no way Neil wasn’t going on a date. Kevin was still trying to convince himself he shouldn’t care: Neil could do whatever he wanted; they weren’t actually together. On the other hand, there had to be no feeling more satisfying in the world than actually trying to ruin this date of his if he really was on one.

 

Decision made, Kevin pulled off the hood of his jacket and crossed the road, following Neil into the bar and just barging in like he owned the place… and knocking into someone about to  drink their wine.

 

Kevin stopped and turned. “Sorry… Jeremy?” He looked around for Neil and found him at a table in the back, with Allison, Seth, his assistant, and of all the lying traitors in his life, Jean.

 

“Hey Kevin,” Jeremy said in a tiny voice as he tried to wipe the spilled wine from off the silk of his shirt. “How’s it going?”

 

Kevin ignored him, eyes drawn to where Neil sat, staring, until Neil looked up and their eyes met.

 

A small woman in a white dress better suited for a Sunday congregation than a bar came to help Jeremy with his shirt before noticing Kevin, and smiling up at him.

 

“Hello Kevin,” she said.

 

Kevin barely acknowledged her. “Do you work here? Can I get a double whiskey, neat?”

 

“Kevin, it’s Renee,” she said, still smiling somewhat awkwardly, as if they knew each other. Kevin had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. “I’m Jeremy’s wife, remember? We vacationed in St. Lucia together. Twice.”

 

“Just get him the whiskey, Renee,” Jeremy said with a roll of his pretty blue eyes. Kevin didn’t pay any attention to him either. “I lost eight pounds since you saw me last. Can you tell?”

 

Kevin vaguely recalled a time when Jeremy was this sort of chubby boy who used to follow Allison around like a lost puppy. He’d really come into that virgin whore twink persona he’d cultivated and would have been marginally interesting, except Kevin wasn’t actually interested in men. Well, maybe except one.

 

“No,” he said, just as Neil emerged through the crowd and dragged him away to the bar by the front of his jacket.

 

“So this is creepy,” he said tartly.

 

“I know,” Kevin agreed. “How could you not invite me to your birthday drinks?”

 

“I meant you just showing up!”

 

Kevin grinned in smug self-satisfaction. “Oh no, I thought you were on a date.”

 

“How is that better?” Neil demanded angrily. “Why’d you think I was on a date?”

 

“A text came through on your phone—”

 

“You snooped?!” Neil thundered. Shit, this really wasn’t going how he really wanted it to go.

 

“No, I couldn’t figure out your password so—”

 

Neil sighed, staring up at him. “What are we doing, Kevin?” He was about to say something more, maybe something neither he nor Kevin could walk away from unscathed when another man walked in, with a tall reedy woman in tow. Kevin thought the man looked vaguely familiar when he drew up to Neil with a secretive smile.

 

“Happy birthday, you.” He had this smug expression that Kevin could only describe as oily as he handed Neil a bottle of what looked to be really expensive wine.

 

Neil smiled uneasily. “Thanks, Ichirou.”

 

The man gestured at the tall model behind him. “Oh, Neil, this is Element.”

 

“LMN?” Neil repeated, intentionally butchering the absurd name.

 

The girl smiled at Neil sharply. “Element. Like oxygen, hydrogen…”

 

“Arsenic,” Kevin added. “Radon.” He could see Neil struggle to suppress his smile.

 

“Ichirou,” the man said, extending a gloved hand to Kevin, who didn’t shake it.

 

“Sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying,” he said, trying not to be as rude as he usually was to what obvious competition.

 

Neil’s smile was threatening to overtake his small face. “Grab yourself drinks. We’re over there.”

 

Ichirou smiled politely. “We actually can’t stay. We’ve a fundraiser for a very promising Guatemalan reform candidate.” He leaned forward, ostensibly to kiss Neil on the cheek. Kevin was sure he was whispering some secret rendezvous for the two of them but he really couldn’t snoop without shoving his face into Ichirou’s space.

 

When he’d left, Kevin turned to Neil. “So that’s why you didn’t invite me.”

 

Neil at least had the decency to look contrite. “Also, I wanted to spare you Seth and Allison.”

 

“Homeboy!” Seth yelled over Allison’s bewildered expression, when he spotted Kevin. “Get your balls over here!”

 

“You know, you could’ve just told me it was your birthday and you’re hanging out with—” he paused distastefully, because Allison was probably not fit to be described the word, “—friends. I wouldn’t have come.”

 

Neil stared up at him incredulously, the eyeliner and glitter on his face making his blue eyes almost luminous in the low light of the bar. “It’s not my fault my birthday came a month after we started… whatever we’re doing!”

 

“You thought he was coming alone,” Kevin said, quietly accusing.

 

“I didn’t ask for any of this to happen in this order!” Neil exclaimed, getting flustered. Kevin was almost afraid he was going to cry.

 

He nodded. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m going to go now.”

 

Neil grabbed his jacket sleeve and latched on. “No, stay.”

 

Kevin scowled. “What? Now that he’s gone?”

 

“Don’t be a dick.”

 

“Fine,” he conceded in his most put upon voice. “But if I’m in danger of having to talk to anyone stupid, just… kick me under the table.”

 

They walked to the rear table together, with Neil smiling awkwardly at everyone. Kevin hadn’t even known that shit-eating face of his was capable of looking uncomfortable.

 

“Hey guys. This is Kevin. He’s uh… the guy I’m sleeping with.”

 

Kevin looked around at the dropped jaws and poleaxed expressions around the table and went to sit with Jeremy because the spot had the added charm of him being able to heckle Allison up close.

 

Jean came up to him looking embarrassed. “He asked me not to tell you.”

 

Kevin glowered. “You’re not my friend anymore.”

 

“Can I still live with you rent-free?” he mumbled, looking like a kicked puppy.

 

“I guess so,” Kevin shrugged. Really, people needed to realize he wasn’t a monster. Also, he wasn’t going to embarrass Neil any more at his birthday. He smiled at Allison and Seth. “Hey guys.”

 

Seth was nodding his approval. “I don’t really get all the dick-slapping, but nice pull. Alli didn’t tell me you were hitting that.” He gestured at Neil, who had wandered to another table full of people he knew from work.

 

“Because I had no idea,” Allison said frostily. She leaned forward, eyes spitting fire. “Did it even occur to you to tell me that you were sleeping with Neil?”

 

Kevin actually found himself smiling genuinely. He loved pissing Allison off. “No.”

 

“You and Neil are poison people,” Allison accused. “This is going to end so badly.”

 

“I know, right,” Kevin laughed, getting up to get Neil another drink. His glass was almost empty.

  


* * *

 

They walked home well into the late night because Neil was thoroughly smashed and Kevin wasn’t about to wreck his car driving them drunk. Renee, who didn’t drink, had dropped them off in the vicinity of Kevin’s neighborhood, and Kevin almost had to carry Neil because he kept tripping over nonexistent rocks on the pavement.

 

“I’m glad you came tonight,” Neil slurred, listing heavily on his side but overall managing to walk without assistance.

 

“Stop,” Kevin complained, but really, Neil could probably continue babbling about what an awesome human being he was. He wasn’t going to stop him. “You’re drunk.”

 

“Tough shit, I am. You’re really growing on me.” He lurched and nearly faceplanted on the asphalt had Kevin not caught him, and he clung to Kevin’s arm like a limpet.

 

“You know, there’s no way that model is better than you in bed,” Kevin said, smiling and realizing he liked the feeling. Later, when Neil wasn’t so drunk, they could probably try out that face-sitting thing.

 

“I know right!” Neil cried, laughing to himself as he hung on. “God, that’s so weird. Sorry about the key.”

 

“Speaking of keys, I should probably get back the one I gave to Aaron. It’s my main key.”

 

“You gave Aaron a key?” Neil asked suspiciously.

 

“To give to you,” Kevin assured him, as they got up to the door. “Wait, he never gave you the key?”

 

“Nope.”

 

Kevin scowled and tried the door, then knocked when he found it locked. It took a moment for the door to open and a mostly naked Aaron Minyard greeted them in all his pasty glory.

 

“What the hell are you doing?” Kevin yelled, just as Neil slurred, “God, I’m gonna be sick!”

 

Aaron smirked as a mostly naked Katelyn showed up to join him, grinning at them. “Sorry, we needed a place.”

 

“You fucking sellout!” Neil cried, and promptly proceeded to vomit all over the naked pair.

 

It figured he would lose the fight with his stomach whenever some hetero couple showed up. Kevin didn’t care. Jean could clean it up in the morning.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note about Jeremy: he obviously has a thing for Kevin, since he keeps insinuating himself into Kevin and Neil's relationship. Also, the weird Jesus and his abs discussion is based on an actual discussion I had with a friend from college. She goes to church to look at Jesus' abs. Also, much love for Allison and Seth. Their characters are my favorite in the TV series. What I have so far:
> 
> Kevin and Neil are sleeping with each other (problematic because Kevin ain't gay y'all). Neil is also into Jean, Kevin's hot roommate, except Jean's an addict. Jean has so far noticed Neil's hot ass, but he's too nice to steal Kevin's man. Jeremy is married to Renee, but he's gay, and also he's been into Kevin since he was a tiny little brat following Allison around. Allison is married to Seth, except she obviously doesn't want to be, and probably only got married to keep up appearances. Also, she's lowkey jealous of the laidback type of romance Kevin and Neil have. Seth really just wants to get drunk and play video games, and Renee is too awkward to be sexual. Is she ace? Is she not? Find out in the next chapters! Aaron is straight, but Neil would so tap that if he could except Aaron grosses him out because he thinks of him as his kid. I had more for Nicky, but my hands hurt from writing so much. Kevin is basically too in love with himself to have any meaningful relationship with _anyone_ , even Neil. Matt is just a kid, and Ichirou is Neil's disgusting side piece.
> 
> Did I round that up neatly? Probably not.
> 
> Next up: Dan Wilds.


	5. Exclusivity only applies to private schools and country clubs (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kevin and Neil decide to date each other exclusively. Of course, not without completely fucking over each other first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Meant to get this up last night, was too sleepy and I had meetings.
> 
> This chapter is based on S1EP6. As usual, all the funny dialogue comes from the show.

When Allison was four years old, she’d been obsessed with Baby All Gone. Although there were infinitely more sophisticated (and highly realistic) baby toys for toddler-aged girls who were scions to billionaire fortunes at the time, she’d been so taken with what her supermodel mother called “weird little plastic-eating machines” and her dad had filled her toy room with dozens of that $25 plastic cherry-eating, fake milk-drinking dolls to her heart’s content. She was maybe seven when her mother stopped coming home from her glamorous Paris photoshoots, and eight when her dad gave her a real live blond toddler to feed real cherries and milk and told her the freckle-faced little toy baby was called Jeremy, and that Allison could play as much “house” and “having a baby” games with him to her heart’s content. Jeremy was also blond and blue-eyed, like Allison was, but where her skin was pale and burned and peeled under the sun, Jeremy tanned beautifully to match his sandy yellow hair.

 

She was twelve when she realized her mom wasn’t coming back for good and that Jeremy, the sweet little paper doll friend that she treated him as, wasn’t a manufactured toy from a Mattel factory in Indonesia, but her dad’s child with yet another supermodel (Brazilian, pretty and roughly thirteen years younger than Allison’s mother.) From then on, he became the bane of her existence, constantly vying for daddy dearest’s attention and always getting the fancier birthday parties because he was a boy and was going to carry on the Reynolds’ family legacy (“Well, tough shit, little snot,” she’d told him when she was eighteen, because her mom wouldn’t sign the divorce papers and Jeremy’s mother went and married some other guy and gave that stupid little dipshit his bland name, even though the Reynolds retained primary custody of that nuisance.)

 

Jeremy was twenty when Allison found out he was gay, and what an absolute rave that had been, lording it over the entitled little shit, lest daddy found out and cut him out of his will.

 

She didn’t quite make peace with his existence in her life until she was twenty-eight and it had been the first time Kevin had broken her heart. Jeremy had driven from Stanford to LA and introduced Allison to his crazy, fun-loving friend, Neil, and they’d gotten absurdly high and drunk and fucked far too many college boys together in a week-long bender of alcohol, Ecstasy and wild sex. Neil knew all the bars to hit, all the TV producers to blow for drugs, and all the cheap 24-hour motels to wash the hangover before night fell, and they could rinse and repeat. Those had been halcyon days of youth and debauchery.

 

Nowadays, her evenings were filled with solo drinking in her kitchen while Seth yelled and cheered alternately at sports shows on ESPN or new video games on XBOX One. Jeremy showed up once a week for nail spa days, but Allison was turning a new leaf since marrying Seth, so she’d mostly stayed away from Neil.

 

Until now.

 

Fresh from couples’ therapy, she clasped Seth’s hand tighter than the pinch of her Herve Leger sheath dress when she sensed that he was itching to copy the two animals stuffing their faces with waffles, bacon and eggs. Their therapist had been trying to get the two of them to reconcile that distance that had widened since she and Seth had gotten married, and the takeaway from this morning’s shrink session was that they needed to cut out all the negativity from their lives, and since Allison couldn’t get rid of her brother, she was just going after the two worst people that she ever had the misfortune of meeting. She couldn’t imagine having ever considered someone so uncouth and crass as Neil and Kevin as a friend and romantic interest respectively. They ate their bacon with their fingers and Neil had maple syrup dribbling down his chin!

 

“...So, our therapist said we need to cut out the toxic elements, which means we just can’t have couples like you in our life anymore,” she concluded pleasantly, softening the blow of rejection with a winning smile, even though, beside her, Seth was staring, open-mouthed (and hopefully in disbelief) as Kevin shoved an entire triangle of toast into his mouth, before doing the same to Neil. Allison had to wonder if these two were even feeding themselves or if Neil subsisted on a diet of bananas and ejaculate (there was no way Kevin would ever do the same; his Tinder profile still identified him as heterosexual.)

 

“Whoa…” Neil said, looking almost offended when a bit of waffle fell out of his mouth when he started talking. “We’re not a couple; we’re just hangin’ out.”

 

Kevin side-eyed him for a bit and shrugged, popping more oily scrambled eggs into his already full mouth. “Wait—Breakfast is still on you, right?”

 

“Yeah, totally,” Seth answered readily. “I gave them my card. It’s Chase Sapph, which means if I use it in restaurants, I double down on the points—”

 

“Anyway,” Allison interrupted, squeezing his hand under the table in a steel grip, “don’t try to talk us out of it.”

 

“...Aight,” Neil said, pouring more syrup on his waffle as the sticky fluid threatened to overflow from his plate.

 

When no further reply was forthcoming, Allison smiled and got up, tugging Seth to his feet. “Well, good luck, both of you.”

 

“I got an XBOX One if you ever wanna dork out online on some Warhammer,” Seth said privately to both of them.

 

Allison wrung his hand painfully until he reluctantly followed her out of the booth. It felt good to finally have some control over her life that didn’t involve polishing off half a bottle of Chardonnay.

 

When they were gone, Neil crowded around Kevin’s plate to steal some of his bacon. “What’re you doing later?”

 

“I’m interviewing Hollywood It girl, Dan Wilds, for Culture Magazine.”

 

“Oh, she’s hot,” Neil said, grinning. “What? I can find chicks hot too! Doesn’t mean I wanna bone them. Anyway, send me pics.”

 

Kevin smirked. “Nudes?”

 

Neil laughed, trying to scoop some of the runny egg yolk onto his fork. “Right. If you think you can get Dan Wilds naked, more power to you.”

 

“I was kidding,” Kevin said, still affecting that smug air, “but since you said we’re not a ‘couple,’ legally, I’m free to try, right?” He grinned that shit-eating grin that told Neil there was probably more to this than he was prepared to think about at 10AM with only one Americano in his system.

 

“Did it bother you when I said that?” he asked, frowning and turning from his mangled waffle to look Kevin in the eye.

 

“No, no, it’s important to set clear rules—” He paused as the diner waitress came by. “Hey! This is on the bloke with the man-bun, yeah?” He grabbed the menu when the waitress nodded. “Right, in that case, we’ll take some things to go: one of everything on the left side, and four of those souvenir t-shirts.”

 

“Ooh!” Neil exclaimed, leaning over. “Throw in a large child’s.”

 

“Your head’s not going to fit in the neck hole,” Kevin commented.

 

“It’s for Matt!” Neil said as if that explained everything.

 

Kevin scowled. “Who?”

 

* * *

  


Kevin sat in a booth in his favorite sports bar, laughing politely at the cheeky introduction Danielle Wilds had given when she slid into the seat across from him with an air of casual confidence that only the truly beautiful who knew how hot they were could affect. He wasn’t really the sort swayed by stupid labels the entertainment media bestowed upon the gorgeous flavor of the minute (a month was the equivalent of the drudgery of eternity in Hollywood, after all) but Dan Wilds had been in the public eye and was pretty much the media’s darling since she burst on the scene a few years ago with her avant-garde performance of a stripper turned sports star in her first movie, _Son Nefes_ , and Kevin could definitely see why even someone as firmly fruity and set in his cock-sucking ways as Neil could find her hot. She was gorgeous: tall and dark and pixie-haired with a lean athletic build, but possessed of the right curves everywhere that mattered, including the lone tiny dimple that creased her left cheek when she smiled.

 

She knew how to play an audience when Kevin asked her if she’d like to get a drink before the interview started (her martini choice was the exact type that said “I’m hot and sexy and entirely too good for you” so Kevin figured a few more whiskey shots were in order to keep up) and her answers to the first set of inane questions he had to ask about her typical day as an in-demand actress were sharp and witty and skated the edge of borderline rude and flirtatious.

 

The notes he’d made were starting to swim a little in his vision when he finally got to the meat of the interview: her role for the recently released blockbuster, _Hennessy_.

 

“So tell me, how does one prepare for a role in which you play—” he glanced at his notes and chuckled at the ridiculous Entertainment Weekly quote for her role, “—a tsunami widow?”

 

Dan laughed, bright teeth glinting against her burgundy lips. “So this is the official quote: ‘It’s a singular pleasure to be able to bring a story of such courage to life.” She grinned at his skeptical expression. “Plus I did six weeks of Paleo and crossfit twice a day.” She smirked. “You can feel it in my calf too.”

 

Kevin blinked and looked down at his lap where she’d extended one fine bronzed leg, shoeless, against his thigh. He glanced around for spectators before worming his hands under the table and gently squeezing the tense muscles above her Achilles tendon.

 

“That does indeed feel like the calf of a grieving widow,” he noted, hand sweeping up the smooth arch of her slim foot. She had pretty feet too: free of any callous, sanded down insole probably from five-hour long foot spas, manicured and painted nails, her large toe pointing outward in a perpetual tense line, probably from the point of her stiletto Valentinos.

 

The smile she flashed at him when he touched her heel was knowing. “Whoa… you’re a foot dude.”

 

“No,” Kevin answered automatically, removing his hands, and then humiliatingly, he blushed. “Yes.”

 

She laughed again. “You don’t have to let go.” He goggled at her but quickly put his hands back to work where he wanted them. “Does your girlfriend have nice feet?”

 

“Oh, he’s not my boyfriend. He said it straight out just this morning: we’re not a couple.”

 

“An equal opportunity cowboy, I like that. But you don’t think he’s just saying it to give you an out?”

 

“No, he’s not like that at all,” Kevin denied. “He’s actually challenged me to try to get a nude photo of you.” He stopped and blinked when Dan smirked. “Of course, I told him that would be completely unprofessional.”

 

Dan stared down at his hands on her foot and bit her lip. “We should get another round.”

 

* * *

 

Jean was having a really good day: the VA had come through with a competent psychiatrist recommendation, who had given him pretty good pills to manage his anxiety and paranoia well enough for him to be able to drive again. Kevin had been on a really long good mood streak since Neil showed up in their lives, and he’d been happy enough when Neil first used the key he’d given him for impromptu, unannounced midday sex after a stressful meeting with his agent that he’d been generous enough to drive Jean to the impound lot the day before so Jean could get his car back. Neil had even chipped in on the impound fee, telling Kevin that they’d have fun in the kitchen if Jean wasn’t around the house since he had a car again.

 

Really, his friends were amazing people, and he was convinced someone like Neil was exactly what Kevin needed to get his fire back, after he’d complained to Jean incessantly about how his break-up with Allison had resulted in the best piece of literature to ever materialize from his pen, and then sucking his life dry the moment it was published. All this good fortune was thanks to the fortuitous crossing of Neil and Kevin’s paths, and although Jean would have really liked to tap that ass too, he would never begrudge Kevin his happiness, especially if it resulted in thirty minutes less of his morning diatribes about daytime TV that Jean enjoyed to keep his mind off drugs.

 

He was so happy, he wanted to make a really good breakfast to thank his friends. Neil loved junk food and would eat chips by the sack for all his meals if no one stopped him, and nowadays, Kevin ate whatever Neil felt like eating (except it needed to be drizzled in extra virgin olive oil and garnished with emmental cheese), so that morning, Jean decided to make the absolute killer nachos that would blow his roommate and his boyfriend out of the water. He’d even thrown in peanuts because Neil loved the crunch.

 

He’d been about to serve it with a flourish when Kevin came up from his bedroom alone and not hungover, a rare event since Neil started sleeping over almost every night. It wasn’t unheard of, of course, some days Neil didn’t influence the three of them into a drunken stupor and Kevin had been working the previous night. He placed three mugs of coffee on the table first, black for Neil, drowned in milk for himself, and just slightly sweetened with Stevia for Kevin, when a woman emerged from Kevin’s room. She was tall, black, beautiful, basically everything Neil was not (except the beautiful part, Jean knew Kevin liked pretty things) and her lacy hot pink bra was peeking through the unbuttoned front of her dress. Jean was acutely aware that he’d been celibate for three years and running now.

 

He stared at Kevin, who scowled at him for whatever he saw on his face, before turning to the woman.

 

“Uhh,” was the most eloquent greeting he could manage as the woman told Kevin she had to go for an early call time on Oprah.

 

“I’ll walk you outside,” Kevin said, throwing a murderous glare at Jean to threaten him to shut his oversharing trap.

 

The woman hopped to the kitchen, grabbed a few Jean’s nachos a la Kevin and Neil, and winked at him as she followed Kevin out of the house. “See you later, hot chef!”

 

He stared after them for a long time after they’d left, wondering if he was just having a dissociative episode or maybe a hallucination. What the shit just happened and where in the world was Neil?

 

* * *

 

“I can’t believe Kevin sent you naked photos of a celeb!”

 

Neil took a sip of his water and scowled. Weekday working lunch in his office served as detox period after the disaster of trying to stuff his face with eggs, waffle, bacon and breakfast sausage when yesterday’s breakfast takeout on Seth’s dime morphed into the worst constipation he’d ever suffered since the time he was twelve and his mother made him go on a diet of goat cheese and cabbage soup because his nutritionist told her he was overweight. Thereafter, Neil had never gone on any weird diet ever again after his gym teacher told him his growth would be stunted if he held off on junk food forever (bless that man, he saved Neil from a lifetime of abused butt hole from shitting bricks after drinking cabbage soup for five straight days. Neil never grew past 5’3” despite getting twice the recommended daily amount of sodium in his diet since, but at least he’d lost the weight forever and if he was short and pasty and retained the upper body strength of a newborn giraffe, well his mother had no one to blame but herself.)

 

Today, Jeremy dropped by his office with Saladstop gourmet lunch (no cabbage!) and he’d shown him the snaps Kevin sent of Dan Wilds’ legs that went for days (caption: “Score. I win.”) Jeremy ragged him incessantly about what a traitor he was for finding Dan Wilds hot.

 

“I kind of dared him to. I didn’t think he’d actually be able to hit that.”

 

“You have to break up with him, big,” Jeremy pointed out. Unlike Neil, his salad lunch included a side of burger, fries and Coke, not the diet kind. “Ooh, what if we spray-painted ‘pedophile’ on his front door? I did that when my neighbors left their Christmas lights up too long.”

 

Neil shrugged. “I can’t exactly get pissed off; I’m not his boyfriend. Besides, the last time I did that to my dad’s secretary, the FBI investigated her for so long, my dad eventually found out and made me help her around the office for a whole summer.”

 

“Well, at least, you have to sleep with someone else too or you’ll resent him forever!” Jeremy cried, far too invested in this casual fling than Neil ever thought to give him credit for. Jeremy was such an awesome friend.

 

“I’m not gonna have sex with some stranger,” he muttered, chewing the straw of his water cup and already considering it.

 

Jeremy scoffed. “And that wasn’t exactly what you did at Allison’s wedding?”

 

“Well, technically, Kevin isn’t a stranger since you and Allison knew him,” he pointed out.

 

Jeremy wouldn’t have it and started rattling off the men he and Neil knew would be good for a quick casual fuck. Ichirou was already out of the question since Kevin knew who he was (also, Neil wasn’t keen on spending several hours on his back with nothing to show for except a marked expansion in his vocabulary for synonyms of the word “pliant”.)

 

“What about that barista you used to date? The one with the giant hog?”

 

Neil made a face. “Gorilla? The size barely made up for the fact that his mustache was connected to his sideburns. I had beard burn on my ass cheeks for weeks when we were going out.”

 

“Ew. Well. A cock is a cock is a cock. After a while, they all start to look the same to me.”

 

Neil rolled his eyes. “You should see the one Seth sent from his operating table of this old bastard with the pruniest balls in existence. Seth put his sunglasses on it and captioned it ‘Horatio Caine.’”

 

“God,” Jeremy sighed. “I don’t know where Allison finds all these weirdos.”

 

  


Two hours later, Neil stood at the claim area of Silverlake Coffee, affecting his best “I belong here, GTFO” look as the barista at the cashier gave him the evil eye for holding up the line. Presently, Joshua Hawking, aka Gorilla, turned from the espresso machine to deliver a venti iced coffee to someone on the line, and started when he spotted Neil smiling at him.

 

“Neil! Long time,” he said with a grin, face splitting and beard bunching up against his awful sideburns the way Neil would really not like to remember now that someone else with a clean-shaven face was actually fucking him.

 

“I know,” he said, careful to keep his distaste for how Hawking had totally not gotten rid of his sideburns after Neil broke up with him over it, from his face. “How have you been? How’s your band?”

 

“Oh, our drummer went scuba diving in Cancun and somehow went deaf, so I’m still here.”

 

Neil had to control every muscle on his face to keep his smile from slipping. “Do you still have your van?”

 

“Yeah, ‘course,” Hawking said.

 

“Right, meet me there in five.”

 

Hawking looked like he might have won the lottery before his face fell. “Oh. Wish I could, but I’m a manager now and if I abandon my post, my boss will fire me.”

 

“Right,” Neil smirked and started walking. He knew what he looked like, and people like him always got what he wanted. Hawking wouldn’t know how to resist.

  


* * *

 

The afternoon was pleasantly quiet, with Dan Wilds gone, and Jean faffing off to go to whatever it was exactly he did in his room  that didn’t involve doing heroin (spoiler: he was probably doing heroin). Matt, the neighbor, had school, so Kevin played Gears of War solo, enjoying the unexpected quiet his normally busy apartment had that would inevitably be broken when Neil and his loud pay-attention-to-me presence commanded when he was around. He’d been busy with whatever it was that publicists did for a living—hobnobbing with the obnoxious LA entertainment media maybe. Kevin wasn’t bothered.

 

He started up from his game when, of course, Neil banged into the house with a coffee shop muffin in a takeout bag and nonchalantly picked up the second controller to play, shredding his muffin carefully to pop into his mouth as he waited to start the next level with Kevin.

 

“Hey,” he greeted, eyeing the logo on the paper bag to see where Neil normally picked up his daytime snacks whenever he wasn’t mooching meals off Kevin.

 

“Congrats on the photos,” Neil said, popping bits of muffin into his mouth. “Dan Wilds, bringin’ back the bush… I thought that went out of fashion with all the waxing salons popping up everywhere.”

 

“It was for a grieving widow role,” Kevin told him. “You’re not mad, are you?”

 

“Nah,” Neil said with a shrug, making himself comfortable on the couch. “I mean, like you said, it’s totally legal for you to do that.”

 

“Because we’re not a couple,” Kevin nodded.

 

“Yeah, we’re just two people being totally cool. I mean you can have sex with celebs; I can bang an ex… which I did…”

 

Kevin stopped playing and turned to Neil, eyes widening. “Wait, what?”

 

Neil gave him his widest shit-eating smile. “Isn’t that great? It means now we’re even”

 

“Who even—”

 

“I ran into that barista I used to see a few months ago. You’re not mad, are you?” Neil parroted back at him.

 

Kevin turned away before Neil could see his face. “Pfft. Of course not. I’m just confused because you used the word ‘even’, because technically, I slept with a sexy, famous celebrity whom I’d just met, while you just re-banged the barista, so that doesn’t really count as a full person, does it? That’s like half a person, at best.”

 

Neil hummed. “Didn’t feel like half a person.”

 

Kevin scowled. “...And I just remembered that guy you’re talking about… Gorilla!”

 

“Oh sure, just rub it in,” Neil snorted.

 

“There’s nothing to rub in. In no world does Hollywood It girl Dan Wilds equal your chai wallah. But sure, by all means,” he smirked, turning back to his game smugly, “let’s call it ‘even.’”

 

Neil dropped his muffin back into the bag and shut off his controller, getting up and tugging the loose neck of his sweater back over where it threatened to slip off one shoulder. Kevin tracked the motion with his eyes.

 

“Where are you going?”

 

Neil marched to the door without looking back. “I have stuff to do.”

 

Kevin sat back and fished his leftover muffin from the takeout bag. It always felt good to be winning.

 

* * *

  


Jean turned the dial of the exercise machine up, so he could press 300 lbs. He’d missed the drop from his dealer two nights ago when Jeremy rolled up in his luxury sports car looking for Neil, who was out at yet another bar, destroying his liver with Kevin. Jean had gotten into the car and hung out with him at a nearby diner because Jeremy looked upset and nothing cheered Jeremy up more than pancakes and lemon squares at 2AM. Jean was feeling antsy, and not just because of withdrawal, and the only way he could deal with his frustrations was to work out an inhuman amount until the voices in his head went quiet.

 

He’d popped up from his room when he heard the front door bang open and was hoping to talk to Neil in private, tell him about the gorgeous woman who’d spent the night in Kevin’s room, and ask him if he was okay, but he and Kevin were bantering on the couch like it was the most normal day, and while Jean knew a bro didn’t break the bro code when it came to people they were sleeping with (he couldn’t bring himself to call Neil a hoe, even though 90% of the time, he dressed like a complete tramp, straight out of a Walmart dollar bin.) He couldn’t just sit by and let Kevin utterly trample on Neil’s heart. Jean had had enough of that from Kevin’s previous conquests and Neil was his friend too, so really, he owed it to him to tell him about Kevin’s infidelity.

 

After a while, though, the bench press just wasn’t cutting it anymore, so he got up to shower and get dressed. Maybe if he talked to his pastor (drug addicts went to church too, and Jean liked to think war hadn’t destroyed him enough that God wouldn’t turn him away from a place of worship when he needed guidance) he’d get some idea on whether he should or shouldn’t tell Neil about Kevin’s booty call.

 

Jeremy’s weird wife was at the reverend’s office when Jean came in to consult. She waved at him, and he sort of felt bad for her because Jeremy was clearly unhappy being married to her if Jean understood the drama he’d unloaded when they hung out. Right now though, it was one problem at a time, and he’d worry about Jeremy’s marital issues with the weird Rainbow Brite Jesus fangirl later.

 

* * *

  


“Actually,” Jeremy said, swigging his beer and waving the bartender over for a second bottle, “you know he’s right.”

 

Neil scowled at him. “Jer!”

 

What a traitor. He’d run to the bar where Jeremy liked to while his afternoons away while Renee volunteered at the community center or prayed to the baby Jesus like a good Bible-thumping church girl, but here was his best friend, absolutely useless and taking the side of his errant not-boyfriend about this race to fuck the next available dick. God, what an absolute snake…

 

“No, think about it: Dan Wilds is a major score. She’s hot and famous and gorgeous, and Gorilla is old news,” Jeremy reasoned. “He’s previously taken dick—PTD if you will.”

 

“PTD…. Okay, so what if it’s a guy I hadn’t exactly taken but I did maybe—”

 

“Slob on it? No, that doesn’t count either,” Jeremy said, cocking an eyebrow. “You’ve got to rule out previously taken or sucked dicks… PTSD.”

 

Neil rolled his eyes. “That’s what Jean has.”

 

Jeremy laughed nervously. “Well, whatever. PTSDs are just half a point. It’s kind of like competitive bird watching: they only get points when they see new species they haven’t already.”

 

“Renee does competitive bird watching?”

 

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Jeremy snapped.

 

Neil snorted, and drank his beer. “Whatever. The whole thing’s stupid.”

 

“So finish it,” Jeremy demanded. “The sooner you put someone behind you, the sooner you can put this behind you.” He smiled triumphantly, absurdly pleased with his witty turn of phrase.

 

“Ugh,” Neil said. “Fine. Let’s get it over with.”

 

They spent the next three hours trawling Sunset Strip bars for Neil’s next potential lay. Neil was confident enough with how he looked that he didn’t have a problem finding guys who’d want to drink with them, but everyone in every bar that night seemed like they were either desperate actors hoping that fucking a publicist would help them get ahead (Neil didn’t usually have a problem using that to get laid, but he didn’t want to have to deal with people trying to _call_ him later in the hopes of “making a connection”), or adorable college boys packed up on their parents’ station wagons, trying to find their dreams in sunny, dog-eat-dog LA.

 

Neil couldn’t stand it, and he left Jeremy talking to a dorky nineteen-year old ginger who’d just packed his life from Ohio and moved to LA, and stepped out into the night air for a smoke that he almost couldn’t get lit because his fingers were shaking from the anxiety of having to one-up Kevin’s conquest.

 

He sighed and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke as he leaned against the door, next to one of the bouncers. “Isn’t it awful that we even have to feel any of this?” he muttered, mostly to himself, because he was feeling low and pathetic, and frankly unaccepting that his hot twink ass couldn’t land him a better score than Kevin. “Lust, love… don’t we have bigger problems to worry about? I’m in a bar, trawling for guys just to prove something to whom? Darwin? To myself? It is embarrassing and beneath us is what I am saying.”

 

The bouncer turned to him and sized him up. “If this Darwin clown is not treating you properly, he’s a goddamn fool.”

 

Neil wasn’t listening anymore. At this point, all he really saw was muscles. Back alley sex was gross but this was going to be so much fun.

  


He rang Kevin up the following morning from his office because his knees had been too banged up, almost kneeling into some day-old puke, and really, sex in a dark alley was pretty disgusting. He had to stand in the shower for hours the previous night before he felt like he’d finally scrubbed off all the bacteria, and his pants went straight into garbage disposal. He hadn’t bothered showing up at Kevin’s because he couldn’t quite stand that smug little smirk he affected whenever they talked about Dan Wilds, and at the moment, it seemed to be all that Kevin could talk about.

 

“Hey,” he said, fiddling with his phone as he put Kevin on speaker, and reclined back on the couch in the break room. “I just wanna tell you that we’re even. We’ve both now slept with someone new.”

 

“What? Gorilla again? That’s not even. My person was a stranger, which makes it one point. Your person was Gorilla, which was half a point. So technically, I was one half up on you, and now with this new person, you’re one half up on me!”

 

Neil shut his eyes, feeling a headache coming on. “Oh my god, Kevin, just let it go, and we’ll call it a draw.”

 

“Well, that’s easy for you to say,” Kevin whinged. “You’re one half up, now I gotta go sleep with an ex.”

 

Neil rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. Good luck with that. I gotta go. Work stuff.”

 

He hung up and lay back down on the couch. Great, now he had a migraine on top of his hangover, his banged up knees and his smarting ass. How was Kevin even worth all this trouble?

 

* * *

  


Kevin sat up from where he’d been slouching on the day bed in his living room while leisurely typing the article he’d been working on when Neil had called him. It was easy enough drafting a message, and he’d saved the numbers of all the girls he’d slept with since moving to LA, so he sent the booty text out to his “Previous Conquests” contact group in his phone.

 

It didn’t take long before his phone flooded with replies.

 

**Sarah: Yeah, nope.**

**Janine: Not interested.**

**Denise: Go die in a fire, asshole.**

**Tara: I’m married now.**

**Georgina: I’m not THAT desperate.**

**Faith: Who the fuck is this?**

**Eliza: Haven’t you destroyed my life enough?**

**Abigail: I moved to Reno.**

 

And on and on it went.

 

Kevin stared at his phone, horrified. Neil couldn’t one-up him like this!

 

He got up and grabbed his keys. The situation needed immediate rectification.

 

* * *

  


Allison sat in her kitchen feeling morose. It was nail spa day but Jeremy hadn’t shown up, and their home salon nail technicians had an appointment with one of those bland Kardashian little children, the ones who weren’t actually offspring of Robert Kardashian, so she’d canceled and watched day-time TV instead, while waiting for Seth to come back home, but Real Housewives was on and the last thing she wanted to see was a reminder that in seven years, she’d have to have plastic surgery appointments because her body was no longer producing enough collagen to counter the effects of gravity on her breasts. Nothing else interested her, so she moved to the kitchen to get started early on her Chardonnay.

 

She’d just poured her second glass when she heard a tap on the patio door, and Kevin’s face popped up as he smiled and waved at her from behind the glass door.

 

Well, if he was here to beg for her presence back in his sorry little life, maybe she’d consider, but only if he groveled for an hour.

 

She got up to open the door and was immediately hit by the pungent stench of whiskey and bourbon, mingling with the smell of cigarettes and Kevin’s cologne, and she wondered, not for the first time, whether getting drunk was all Kevin ever did with Neil. It was 3PM and broad daylight, and Kevin was already smashed!

 

“I hope you’re here to pay the $300 you racked up at breakfast the other day,” she said tartly.

 

Kevin didn’t rise to her bait and looked at her with the most pathetically wretched expression. “Why does everyone hate me? I know it’s weird to ask you, you rightfully hate my guts, but what’s wrong with me that I can’t sustain a single relationship?”

 

Allison stared at his miserable face and sighed, stepping aside to let him in. “I hate emotional Kevin.” Seriously, how did he even get to this level of sloshed at 3 in the afternoon?

 

Kevin didn’t waste time dumping his drama on her as she poured him a glass. (Really, she shouldn’t be letting him drink at all, but she needed to be drunk for this conversation herself, if she was going to deal with this shit so early in the day.)

 

“Everyone I care about ends up hating me,” he said, looking like the saddest, most forlorn kicked puppy in the history of cute sad animal Vines. “Why is that?”

 

“Because you’re a narcissist with face blindness, who without hesitation or consequence, uses people to get what you want,” she answered. Just because he was so gloom and doom didn’t mean she was going to spare his feelings. Heaven forbid Kevin Day find out what a complete asshole he truly was.

 

Kevin actually smiled at that. “God, you know me so well.” He pulled up his cigarette packet to light up.

 

“Can I have one of those?”

 

“They’re pretty expensive,” Kevin said.

 

Allison rolled her eyes. “I know. I used to buy them for you all the time, now shut up and give me one.”

 

“So where’s Seth?” Kevin asked casually, actually relinquishing a stick.

 

“You just missed him. He just left to do his rotation.” She put the stick to her mouth and leaned over to let Kevin light it, but before he could get the light up, he pulled the stick off her mouth and kissed her.

 

Allison scrambled backwards, shoving him away. Kevin’s mouth tasted of clove cigarettes and bourbon, a dangerous combination. She wiped her mouth of the taste, uncaring if she smeared her lipstick.

 

“Oh my god, Kevin, what the hell?”

 

“Oops. Sorry.” Kevin didn’t look sorry at all.

 

“God, just leave already,” she hissed, shutting her eyes at the memory.

 

It was only after she heard the click of the patio door that she opened her eyes and realized Kevin had left his cigarettes on the counter, but taken her Chardonnay.

 

* * *

  


Kevin met up with Neil later at the arcades to blow off steam on 3D pinball. When he got there, Neil had already racked up an impressive winning streak and was abusing the pinball levers and buttons while his beer gathered condensation and turned warm. God. It was so annoying how hot he was when he was all angry and worked up. That needed to be rectified. Neil couldn’t have the upper hand in this game.

 

“I forgot to mention, we’re even,” he said, forcing his voice to sound casual, and mostly failing when Neil gave him a side-eyed glare. “One and a half to one and a half. I bagged an ex.”

 

“Ah,” Neil said, turning back to his game. The line of his back was so tense, Kevin thought he would snap any minute now. “Who was she?”

 

“Just this girl,” he lied. Neil didn’t have to know Allison didn’t sleep with him. She threw him out of her house when he tried to kiss her! “You don’t know her. Unmemorable, but pliant.”

 

The word seemed to piss Neil off even more. “Great, so we are even.”

 

“Are you mad?”

 

“No,” Neil said. “Why would I be mad? Anyway, aren’t we just two independently existing people who get together to have sex sometimes.”

 

Kevin lost his game and fished in his pocket for another quarter. “What? How do I determine what we are? You’re the one who started this whole thing with—”

 

“No, you did! You did goddamn Hollywood It girl Dan Wilds,” Neil cried.

 

“Only because you said I could!” Kevin returned, unable to keep his annoyance out of his voice any longer.

 

Neil ignored him. “And then I sleep with one guy and you freak out.”

 

“It was one and a half guys!” He lost his game again and turned to look at Neil pointedly.

 

“Why don’t you just admit that you’re jealous if I sleep with other guys?” Neil whined, still winning his game.

 

“Fine! But only if you admit you are when I do the same.”

 

A nervous laugh bubbled out of Neil’s mouth. “I’d be really mad if you did fuck other guys, though. That’s awful. Makes me feel so… un-special.” He made a face, and then continued in a sarcastic voice: “I guess we should just be ‘exclusive’ if we’re going to freak out.”

 

Kevin mimicked his tone. “Oh yeah, let’s do that. Guess we’ll just be ‘exclusive.’”

 

Neil stopped playing suddenly and let his game die, so he could look at Kevin. “Wait, are we being sarcastic or are we really exclusive?”

 

Kevin blinked and turned to him. “Yeah, I got a little bit lost there, but okay. Let’s do that.”

 

“Okay,” Neil said, a tiny smile curving the corners of his lips. Why the fuck was this man so fucking irresistible? “Cool.”

 

Kevin stared at him for a beat longer. “Yeah. Cool.”

 

* * *

  


They were spooning in bed a few hours later after having really loud make-up sex when a knock rattled the door. Neil looked up from where he’d been about to fall asleep with his head cradled against the crook of Kevin’s arm as Jean sidled into the room with his eyes covered by his hand, presumably so he didn’t see anything he wasn’t meant to see.

 

“Neil, I’m sorry that I have to tell you this because I know it’s going to upset you, and Kevin, I know we’re friends and you’re going to hate me for ratting—”

 

“Jean, we’re not doing anything,” Kevin interrupted impatiently.

 

Jean opened his eyes and blinked as he took the two of them in, cocooned under Kevin’s comforter, Kevin’s long limbs wrapped around Neil’s body in every possible way, and struggled to suppress a smile.

 

“So what’s this dire news I desperately needed to know?” Neil prompted sleepily.

 

“Uh,” Jean said, leaning against the door and losing his battle with the fond smile that overtook his face. “I was gonna make you guys nachos a la Kevin and Neil, but it turns out we’re out of peanuts.”

 

“So make them without the peanuts,” Kevin said irritably. Neil shrugged and nodded.

 

“Okay,” Jean said, looking unbearably fond. “I will.”

 

Neil turned to look at Kevin, who had his face plastered to his head and was sniffing his hair, and stifled a laugh. Jean was adorable, but he was such a weirdo, and even though Neil didn’t really mind having sex with all of those random guys, nothing could quite compare to the feeling of sleeping next to his boyfriend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sister said it was squick for Kevin/Dan, but eh. This is not as bad as Kevin/Riko and there's nothing explicit. Exploring Allison and Jeremy's background in this story is kind of a huge thing for me, because it's a major departure from the narrative of the character Jeremy is based on from the TV series.
> 
> There's a pattern somewhere in the POVs. More on that later. Plus: Jean is a Kevineil shipper, this is the cutest thing ever! 
> 
> Also, I am running out of AFTG characters and Andrew still hasn't shown up (sorry!)
> 
> Up next: taking a break from the Kevineil to talk about Jean and Jeremy hanging out. Wish me luck. I've never written Jerejean before.
> 
> Come yell at me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mumuinc). I'd love to talk more about the meta and planning that went into this story.


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